Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.
Its possible to just coat the surface if that's the effect needed. I was so happy a year ago that I had found copper Ethernet wire. However upon inspection recently the wire is basically aluminum coated in copper. Usually, platers will first clean the surface and then electro less coat nickel on aluminum. Then you can coat other things like copper. Aluminum forms an oxide almost instantly in normal atmosphere so its difficult to coat with anything. But electroless nickel works very well after an HCl bath or a nitric bath.
We just need to use it in smart ways
We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying
Didn't China just punt off a ticket to some asteroids? Viability tests maybe?
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We do have enough copper
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Copper can be replaced with other materials in many applications
While we should always be careful about how we expend natural resources, we should not fall into sensationalism.
Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)
Ea-Nasir treats his customers and the world with contempt.
Well the earth is already developed enough so i guess the copper was enough???
Catch me in Uganda
Yeah but maybe instead of wasting all pur fucking resources on phones which we buy every year we could pour some of that into developing critical infrastructure in places that need it. Also aluminium, if youre desperate, is a pretty good replacement for copper. I have a really hard time believing copper would be an actual bottleneck in this.
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this website is cancer. I'm I'm mobile and counted 6 ads in my view with space left for 3 lines of text. Don't post crap like this. Yes, i normally use an ad blocker but this is inside the connect app
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it could be theess of a website but i saw no link to a peer reviewed publication, so i think its safe to assume were good with he cooper
This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:
Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.
This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.
That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism's need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered "demand creation" (through advertising) and now even "growth hacking" to supercharge this process. It has made us more wasteful than ever. We are headed into a wall.
This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.
Artificial demand creation isn't necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.
And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that's a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.
I don't disagree, but I don't see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.
There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn't really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.
Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.
This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don't need and dont have the time nor energy to use.
What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.
I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.
I think this kind of artificial demand creation is the main driver for all resource consumption
We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.
I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)
But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I'm literally typing on the older phone now.
I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.
Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.
I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.
But if we don't start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we're going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.
Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It's technically "consumption" to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you're talking about doesn't factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That's about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren't going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.
If you're going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that's morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we're talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.
First of all, thank you. I don't want to be telling developing nations to halt their progress. You underscore where my mindset could be prescriptive and harmful.
Second, my point is that we seem to only get infrastructure or 'progress' when it can be weaponized under capitalism to make someone money, the same way we can't have meaningful recycling systems because it will never be profitable over virgin plastics and other single-use materials.
My attitude has been morphing into "nobody gets second until everybody gets first plates" but for housing, accessories, tools, etc -- that plays directly into the kinds of capital equipment, network buildouts, and supply chains that deliver iPhones to us for $1,000 when the actual material, energy and human cost could be easily 30x that.
I'm saying the paths and lanes that deliver consumer goods and experiences are obscuring the waste therein, and that they drive copper crisis just like every other scarcity crisis.
Abolish copper coins. Job done :-)
Largely done already, as I understand it. Most use zinc now.
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