Britons Urged To Dig Out Unwanted Electricals To Tackle Copper Shortage (theguardian.com) 110
Scientists have called for people to go "urban mining" after a study revealed that old cables, phone chargers and other unused electrical goods thrown away or stored in cupboards or drawers could stave off a looming shortage of copper. From a report: The research found that in the UK there are approximately 823m unused or broken tech items hiding in "drawers of doom" containing as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper -- including 627m cables -- enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK's planned transition to a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030.
Copper is essential in the drive to decarbonise the economy -- being a crucial element of solar and wind developments as well as electric cars. The study found that unused electrical goods could contain as much as $349m worth of copper. Scott Butler, from Recycle Your Electricals, which produced the study, called on the public to start recycling their unwanted electrical goods. "We need to start 'urban mining' and help protect the planet and nature from the harmful impacts of mining for raw materials and instead value and use what we have already." Butler added that people often do not realise that cables and electricals contain valuable materials. "If binned or stashed, we lose everything inside them." The group is now urging everyone to check its "recycling locator" for their nearest facility.
Copper is essential in the drive to decarbonise the economy -- being a crucial element of solar and wind developments as well as electric cars. The study found that unused electrical goods could contain as much as $349m worth of copper. Scott Butler, from Recycle Your Electricals, which produced the study, called on the public to start recycling their unwanted electrical goods. "We need to start 'urban mining' and help protect the planet and nature from the harmful impacts of mining for raw materials and instead value and use what we have already." Butler added that people often do not realise that cables and electricals contain valuable materials. "If binned or stashed, we lose everything inside them." The group is now urging everyone to check its "recycling locator" for their nearest facility.
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Wrong, cause the democratic party is made of rubber, and the commies will bounce off them and stick to the Glue Old Party! Seriously, how old are you?
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lmfao. This whole thread so far feels like the same AC posting responses to himself. Multiple Personality Disorder perhaps?
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I disagree with your assement, and so do I.
Just walk to the (Score:1)
...Department of Funny Devices.
No. Floppytron needs to live (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
John Denver's- Country Roads on FLOPPOTRON
Nicely playing on an array of old floppy drives, old hard disks, old scanners, etc.
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Correction, "Ministry of"
Copper price (Score:2)
Copper price is currently $4.41 per pound [tradingeconomics.com], so you're not really losing much money by recycling your old cables.
If you have a million pounds of old cables lying around, yes, you might want to sell them for scrap metal prices, but a drawer full of old SCSI and dead ethernet cables, not worth the bother.
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a drawer full of old SCSI and dead ethernet cables
is worth a lot more money on eBay to sell to "retrocomputing" enthusiasts.
I'm old enough now to understand what my mom used to tell me: vintage is the old shit young people of today buy at crazy prices that we couldn't be rid of fast enough when better things came along.
I entered the job market when the norm was beige PC clones with floppy drives. I never want to see a beige PC or floppy drives - or floppies - ever again. But apparently that shit is worth money today.
So yeah, if I hadn't binned that stuff d
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vintage is the old shit young people of today buy at crazy prices that we couldn't be rid of fast enough when better things came along.
Usually, but not always. For instance, I have a Nak Dragon tape deck that is considered to be the best tape deck ever made, but nobody wanted to rid themselves of it and it sells for a hellovalot more than I bought it for. But computer parts, like you said, especially fall under this category.
I never want to see a beige PC or floppy drives - or floppies - ever again. But apparently that shit is worth money today.
I learned that the hard way. Back in early 2000s I donated all my 5.25" floppy drives and kept just a 1.2MB one for when I was ready to copy my disks to HD. By the time I got around to doing that, which was a coupl
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It's worth money because most of them have been "recycled" (ended up in landfills). Things costed nothing back then because ...well, they were commodity items still being produced. Floppy drives aren't being produced anymore.
I don't consider myself a "collector", but i do own and keep running a couple Commodores, an Amiga, and a CRT text terminal. As far as "retro gaming" goes, I've replaced it with emulation. I have a Super NES and a N64 but I don't plan on buying any more consoles. It's a rabbit hole I ha
I suspect this is yet another mess (Score:1, Redundant)
It doesn't matter what the price of a commodity is if you can't get it into your country because the confusion and chaos.
I suspect that as soon as the baby boomer generation shuffles off this great mortal coil the UK will rejoin the EU. But those old codgers have really dug their feet in. Sunk costs. They don't want to admit they were wrong. Also most of 'em are still doing alright (having gr
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Yes, yes. It's those terrorists we need to worry about, not the people [cnn.com] from your own [metro.co.uk] country [bbc.co.uk].
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Spurred on by more renewable energy initiatives, including the rise of electric cars, the copper industry is moving closer to long-term demand bottlenecks in Europe.
Germany is worse off than the UK FYI, Germany right now costs are 8.94, 4.07 in the UK and 4.41 in the US.
"Moving Towards" doesn't mean there yet (Score:2)
And there isn't enough metal on the planet to build cars for everyone that wants them. We're either going to start moving away from car based society into public transit & walkable cities or we're gonna go all dystopian. Not sure which, but physics and math mean we don't have a choice baring the invention of Alchemy.
And we're nowhere's near asteroid mining either.
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there isn't enough metal on the planet to build cars for everyone that wants them
Of course there is. You use Aluminum, which is everywhere. Metal is not the limiting factor, energy is. Aluminum makes that worse up front but better on the back end; once you've recycled it just once, you've reached energy parity with steel, and automobiles are the most aggressively recycled consumer good on the planet.
Re: "Moving Towards" doesn't mean there yet (Score:1)
If this is caused by Brexit, then you are saying Brexit was a great success because the UK is enjoying some of the cheapest imports across Europe not just for copper. Unless Brexit is somehow to blame for the global shortage caused by fake-green projects like solar and wind.
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Re: I suspect this is yet another mess (Score:2)
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Sweden, 1968, IIRC. OK, 3 September, 1967 [wikipedia.org].
From Wiki : "On Dagen H, Sunday, 3 September 1967, all non-essential traffic was banned from the roads from 01:00 to 06:00. Any vehicles on the roads during that time had to come to a complete stop at 04:50, then carefully change to the right-hand side of the road and stop again (to give others time to switch sides of the road and avoid a head-on collision) before
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Why is there no commercial activity here?
Because "people" don't typically know. They accumulate copper while acquiring various things and eventually they have a bunch of junk, a lot of which is valuable copper. It's entirely reasonable to inform the public that they may be sitting on something of value and should consider recycling it (or, likely as not, selling it,) as opposed to letting it rot. This is all perfectly fine.
The part that one should discount are the claims that this will contribute some great boon to "renewables" or whatever.
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All in all, a bit over 200 quid, and a couple of trips to the local scrapyard - which Dad remembered takin
ring circuits (Score:2)
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Always a good sign (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm all for recycling, but it's definitely a good sign for your economy when scavenging like a zombie movie is the only way to continue, right?
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Might take a page from the US tweaker playbook.
They're some of the hardest working people in our country. They deserve a holiday to honor them.
recycling (Score:2)
In my town I can drive copper-rich waste like this to my local recycling center and drop it in a big bin of ewaste (which gets "gleaned" by the locals before the authorities pick it up), but I can't put it in the recycling can and push it to the kerb. Recycling is so badly broken here.
But then I recently stayed at another person's home and saw what mixed up crap they put in their recyle bin, so the system doesn't really stand much of a chance
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In my town I can drive copper-rich waste like this to my local recycling center and drop it in a big bin of ewaste (which gets "gleaned" by the locals before the authorities pick it up), but I can't put it in the recycling can and push it to the kerb. Recycling is so badly broken here.
But then I recently stayed at another person's home and saw what mixed up crap they put in their recycle bin, so the system doesn't really stand much of a chance
There's an incentive problem here. If I'm giving away my recycling for free, I have no incentive to properly sort paper from glass from copper from spoiled leftovers.
If the copper and gold in e-waste truly is valuable, more valuable than mining and refining new ore or industrial scale recycling when tearing down a building, surely someone will pay me for the e-waste. If no one is willing to buy it, perhaps recycling isn't as valuable as we think. Just toss it in the skip. At some future point, the landfill
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I feel I have an incentive in that I want to "do the right thing" but the directions are evidently not clear enough on what the right thing is.
"Do the right thing" isn't a very strong incentive, not for everyone. Couple that with vague or complex directions, as you write, leads to a jumbled mess. If the directions are vague, many people, your neighbors and my spouse included, don't have enough incentive to figure out what to do so they guess.
If the incentive were stronger, and money talks, people would make the effort to properly sort waste. I'm not sure how to structure some sort of cash incentive in a way that makes economic sense and that's the
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If no one is willing to buy it, perhaps recycling isn't as valuable as we think. Just toss it in the skip. At some future point, the landfill may become a new copper mine.
A shovel full of sand is worthless. If I need 10 yards of it for fill, it'll cost me about $300 + the cost to roll the truck out. Some things only have value when they are aggregated in great quantities, and it is not economical to go through the effort of paying 5000 people $0.25 to aggregate that great quantity.
This is an area where strictly free markets fail us because if we wait until copper is scarce enough that it makes economic sense to pay people an appreciable amount for old cables or mine landfills, we will at that point be living in a dystopia. We need to find social and regulatory goods that allow for recycling now, even if it doesn't break even. Maybe that's a VAT on new goods that goes to recycling programs that operate at a loss. Some of the tax could be refunded to you as an incentive to turn in old items.
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A shovel full of sand is worthless. If I need 10 yards of it for fill, it'll cost me about $300 + the cost to roll the truck out. Some things only have value when they are aggregated in great quantities, and it is not economical to go through the effort of paying 5000 people $0.25 to aggregate that great quantity.
The shovelful of sand isn't worthless, it's worth a penny or so. That's not exactly zero, just close. One of my favorite economists, Mike Munger, has a favorite saying, "the answer is transaction costs." As you've correctly identified, the transaction costs of finding 5,000 people to each bring a shovelful of sand to your driveway make acquiring sand that way uneconomical. Only when you buy a yard at a time do the transaction costs stop dominating.
This is an area where strictly free markets fail us because if we wait until copper is scarce enough that it makes economic sense to pay people an appreciable amount for old cables or mine landfills, we will at that point be living in a dystopia.
I'm not sure why you'd say that. It's not like we're going t
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Almost anywhere right now you can leave copper out on the curb and be guaranteed it will be gone by the next day, and we predicted this a few years ago with the rise of green energy initiatives as predicted: https://www.kristechwire.com/i... [kristechwire.com]
Copper Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything less than 14 AWG (2 mm^2) is a PITA to recycle and not worth
the effort (unless you are allowed to burn the insulation). And that's after removing the cable from the device / structure / etc.
So all this copper has value *after* dumping hours of labor into recycling it.
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They burn the insulation off in most of the world. A few places do that cleanly.
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You're missing the point. There is no feasible way to remove insulation from copper wires. It takes *hours* to remove even small amounts. There is simply no way around it so we shouldn't bother to recycle copper.
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You're missing the point. There is no feasible way to remove insulation from copper wires. It takes *hours* to remove even small amounts.
Maybe that was just a bad choice of words, but it's certainly feasible and can be done quickly and at scale; it's just not profitable to do so yet.
As an example by way of a quick google seach: https://www.gominerecycling.co... [gominerecycling.com]
One of the smaller machines handles 0.1 - 30mm wire and processes 30-50kg/h.
Their large one outputs 1.2-1.8 tons/h, and is only as big as 2 shipping containers.
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I can do it in a few seconds. Gimme 30A on your 14AWG.
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You missed the point you're replying to. Yes there is a feasible way to remove it: BURN IT, collect the copper afterwards. There are many places that do so, it just isn't very energy or environmentally efficient.
There is simply no way around it so we shouldn't bother to recycle copper.
False. Effort is not the factor as to whether we should recycle something, scarcity and impact of not recycling it is.
Lol (Score:2)
Britain having to ask people to do this, meanwhile over here in the US we have plenty of meth addicts doing it for free :).
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including 627m cables (Score:3, Funny)
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The international system system?
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No, it's 627 millicables, or 0.671 cables.
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I thought: what are they going to gain with 627 meters of cable? Then it dawned on me: the SI system remains difficult in the English speaking part of the world...
It's just England and the US. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Belize and South Africa have managed just fine.
The UK isn't as bad as the US, every English/Scot/Welsh/Northern Irish knows metric as well as some Imperial, in fact there will be a lot more young people without a full understanding of the Imperial system (I.E. that 8 pints == a gallon, let alone why the US and Imperial gallon are different) than older people who never adopted to metric. Metric has been the basis for education for year
Lost? Where did our garbage get sent? (Score:3)
TFS: "If binned or stashed, we lose everything inside them."
If binned, they go to the landfill. Go urban mine that!
If stashed, they're not lost at all. Furthermore, it'd be better to reuse them for their intended purpose where possible, not toss them into recycling.
I keep expecting the day when all the garbage dumps get bought out by mining (recycling?) operations. But I guess that will come after the garbage pipeline has monetized the stream of incoming garbage (easier to separate, especially once you get everyone helping you along the route).
Quite telling (Score:3)
That's the sort of thing asked of the population during wartime restrictions or extreme poverty. I'm not saying it's bad advice, but the fact that it's given at all is indicative of the state of the economy in the UK.
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That's the sort of thing asked of the population during wartime restrictions or extreme poverty. I'm not saying it's bad advice, but the fact that it's given at all is indicative of the state of the economy in the UK.
These are the Brexit Benefits mate.
How's that Brexit doing for you? (Score:2, Funny)
And before anyone says "It's not Brexit!" here I am in America and I've got plenty of copper.
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Yes, it's horrifying. They're actually recycling instead of just setting their resources on fire and dancing around the toxic flames!
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This sounds like a ww2 flashback. What’s next, dehydrated eggs and carrots for sugar?
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Go and boil your head you old twat, this has nowt to do with Brexit, merely that it's generally unprofitable to recycle old copper cable without getting fined for polution. when you burn them
Where I live in the "post brexit UK" the local council recycling lorries will not accept old cables.
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Currently US copper prices are higher than the UKs you idiot. Germany they're nearly double the cost of the UK. So-called green energy and electric cars requiring massive investments to handle higher peak demands with lower baseloads on the power infrastructure is driving the shortages.
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Currently US copper prices are higher than the UKs you idiot.
If he's the idiot, what do you think will happen to the copper prices paid by the UK if they start purchasing more copper during a shortage?
Re: How's that Brexit doing for you? (Score:1)
The shortages are global, the entirety of Europe is trying to get copper for their green initiatives. The Netherlands alone requires 2780T of copper in the power lines alone for the next 5 years just so their grid wonâ(TM)t fall over from their solar/wind projects, Germany is projected to need 4x as much. And we havenâ(TM)t talked yet about transformers, EV mandates, residential power overhauls for all of these boondoggles.
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Brexit has been a total disaster for this country, causing its own kind of meltdown.
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ACSR is only for the really large power lines, the biggest problem is local distribution - basically everyone has panels on their roof, they become a power plant and must be wired accordingly.
Brexit has moderated a lot of the fluctuations Europe has been facing, which the UK would have been paying for being one of the 'richer' nations in the EU.
Tell me about Los Angeles, okay? (Score:3)
You're literally melting down old bits of copper.
And before anyone says "It's not Brexit!" here I am in America and I've got plenty of copper.
I enjoy a good Brexit story as much as the next guy, but are you the guy?! Can we talk?
$46,000 in stolen copper and aluminum found at recycling center [latimes.com], Los Angeles police say
Copper wire thieves plunge L.A. neighborhood into darkness [latimes.com]
Copper thieves leave 6th Street Bridge — the ‘Ribbon of Light’ — completely in the dark [latimes.com]
Thieves target LA County cemetery, steal plaques [foxla.com]
Does the UK burry power cables? (Score:3)
If so, I can foresee some unfortunate incidents happening.
Re:Does the UK bury power cables? (Score:2)
Gah, I know its bury but my brain always goes burry. I hate English some days.
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Gah, I know its bury but my brain always goes burry. I hate English some days.
Did you bury the berry in order to come up with "burry"? Or did your brain go blurry and drop the letter 'l'? ;-)
Honestly since I pronounce it as berry yet I know its a u, so I end up with burry. I'd fail spelling bees.
Guatemala (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Environmentalists" just shut down the largest copper mine in the world in Guatemala.
The same ones who need the entire world supply of copper through 2169 to meet their 2030 goals.
The same people who shut down all those atomic energy stations and then bellyached about carbon dioxide.
These people should be serving fries, not running governments.
Scratch that - I like properly-cooked fries.
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Spot on.
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It looks like the mine closure is a complex matter with the environment being a concern. https://www.reuters.com/market... [reuters.com]
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The same ones who need the entire world supply of copper through 2169 to meet their 2030 goals.
No, we don't. Almost everything you can do with copper can be done with aluminum, only a little bulkier. This is only problematic for small motors and other users of fine copper wire. All of this "we need more copper for wiring" stuff is total bullshit. There are additional considerations when using aluminum, but these days the alloys are very good (they have good strength and flexibility) so the only real problem is termination. And that is a solved problem, you simply have to know what you are doing. You
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The "Environmentalists" just shut down the largest copper mine in the world in Guatemala.
The same ones who need the entire world supply of copper through 2169 to meet their 2030 goals.
The same people who shut down all those atomic energy stations and then bellyached about carbon dioxide.
These people should be serving fries, not running governments.
Scratch that - I like properly-cooked fries.
What the fuck are you talking about? The wiki page for "Mineral industry of Guatemala" [wikipedia.org] lists zero copper mines. This list [mining-technology.com] of the ten largest copper mines lists zero Guatemalan mines. A sibling post thought you might be talking about the Cobre mine in Panama, but it's certainly not the largest either.
If you can't get basic facts about your rant correct, why should anyone pay attention to the rest of your analysis? You're just an old man shaking his fist at a cloud, ranting about immigrants eating pets be
Re: Guatemala (Score:1)
Duh, because they closed them, it was pretty well covered over the past few years mines in Guatemala and Panama were closed after international courts decided they should shut down, environmentalists considered it a major win. Guatemala as a result completely stopped their lucrative mining industry and has since seen increased economical and political instability.
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The same people who shut down all those atomic energy stations and then bellyached about carbon dioxide.
You mean the atomic energy stations that...
- occasionally suffer accidents that have hundred- or thousand-year consequences?
- produce radioactive waste that - to date - we do not have long term plans for the storage or disposal of?
- require fuel, the mining and generation of which also produces radioactive waste (if low level waste), and has dire health consequences for the miners when accidents do NOT happen?
- are not actually cost-competitive with renewables? Are even less cost-competitive when you forc
if I help out (Score:2)
Sounds 'carbon positive' to me (Score:2)
Gasps from a dying civilization (Score:2)
The amendment at the end is the most important bit.
This article was amended on October 8 2024. An earlier version said copper production was outstripping demand; it is, of course, the other way around.
That said recycling trash will become more important into the future simply because that's where everything is at...
Comically transparent (Score:2)
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But guys, it's NOT because drawing 20,000 - 100,000 watts to charge an electrical vehicle instead of the mean max 1800 watts concurrent for a household to blame.
6-10kW is ample for charging overnight. Heck, I got by with a measly 1.3kW for a time (110V/15A L1 charger), but I wouldn't recommend it. I have a 9.6kW charger now, and honestly most of the time it feels like overkill. But any way you slice it, households aren't going to be drawing 100kW any time soon.
The higher power ratings are only needed when you need to fast charge. Most people are going to be charging overnight, at work, or while running errands at L2 chargers.
Re: Comically transparent (Score:1)
6-10kW is still 10x your average power draw, even more considering it is at night and EVERYONE needs to do it. The Netherlands solved it in some neighborhoods by putting a single charger per street (you are not allowed to run cables on or under the sidewalk yourself) which you need to rent at typically 4x the energy cost (~1 euro per kWh), stand there for more than 4 hours and you get billed what they call a âstickyâ(TM) rate which could cost you 120 euro overnight, which they lowered from a 40 eu
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6-10kW is still 10x your average power draw, even more considering it is at night and EVERYONE needs to do it.
2-5kW is what an electric dryer draws, and that is pretty consistent over a couple of hours. An electric range is going to be between 1.5 and 3kW, depending on the type and model. A water heater is going to be between 1-4kW. A 3 ton AC unit is also about 2-3kW. The only way an electric car is 10x the draw is if someone had no other major electric appliances and relied strictly on natural gas/propane or oil for everything and never made use of heat pumps or AC.
All of the above with the exception of the
My copper hobby (Score:2)
I load the hopper up up with pennies, turn it on, and come back later to find a small(ish) bucket of 1982 or earlier coppper US pennies, and a much larger bucket of 1982 or later copper washed zinc US pennies.
I sell the zinc pennies back to a bank that has a free Coinstar machine, purchase more penny rolls when I happen
Environmental disaster (Score:1)
Just send them meth (Score:1)
So much copper will magically appear
recycling copper (Score:1)
But I was told space has infinite resources? (Score:1)
Just mine an asteroid? Hm, or maybe our energy future is dire and we're going to have to rummage through the waste products of our profligate society?
Nah, space is the answer.
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Just mine an asteroid?
There's no "just" mine an asteroid because after the moon we rested on our laurels. If we had kept up the drive for development of space we could have had mining by now. Hell, we even had a plan to build a space station out of orbiter main tanks and then just decided not to bother because it would cost money. We could have had a station big enough to support at least research into those activities decades ago!
As a species we frankly deserve what's happening to us. Even monkeys are smart enough to replace sh
I know where it all is (Score:2)
I think my friend Steve has it all. I know for a fact he has well over 100 hard drives with less than 1G capacity stored away that he's been keeping for years. In the same cupboard there's boxes of cables and connectors, most of which haven't fitted anything since about 1990, as well as all sorts of other obsolete tech. If he clears out the cupboard he could almost fix the problem single-handed.
And how much will they pay us? (Score:2)
Yep. (Score:2)
I used to use a computer recycler who would take anything electronic off my hands so long as we included a box of cables (e.g. in the UK we already throw out the EU power cables that come with items, etc.).
Apparently he would sell the copper on and that would basically pay for all the other things he had to do to get rid of the electronic waste as there was basically no money in the electronic waste itself.