Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos
- Reference: 1717157710
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/31/copper_wires_recycling/
- Source link:
The estimate comes from British engineering company TXO, which claims there's up to 800,000 metric tons of copper wiring that could [1]be harvested in the next ten years. TXO claims over a dozen telcos are investigating extracting copper wires from old networks to sell on the open market.
The need for copper wiring is declining as carriers adopt fiber optics, which have superior carrying capacity – one upcoming fiber technology is expected to increase the [2]data capacity of undersea cables by 12 times
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While repurposing old stuff isn't unusual, recycling copper can be particularly valuable as the conductive metal is a crucial material for things like solar panels and batteries, which rely on old-school electrical wiring.
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A 2022 report from S&P Global estimated [6]demand for copper would double by 2035 – from 25 million metric tons in 2022 to 50 million – and since the copper mining industry reportedly won't be able to keep up with demand, that means higher prices. Copper is already 50 percent more expensive since the COVID-19 pandemic, and prices will likely continue to increase.
[7]UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled
[8]Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them
[9]Norway has a month left until sun sets on its copper phone lines
[10]Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery
Recycling copper won't be easy. Many of the wires telcos have installed over the years are underground and may have degraded. Digging the metal up and getting it into a saleable condition will entail non-trivial expenditure.
However, recycling may not be able to fill in the gap between supply and demand completely, the report claims, which means each ton that gets recycled is individually worth more – making the prospect of digging it up and processing it more economically viable. At current copper prices, recycling operations can net a 30 percent profit, it's claimed.
AT&T only recycled 14,000 tons between 2021 and 2023 – worth potentially an estimated $86 million to $120 million based on copper prices during those years – but it is picking up the pace. "It's gotten to be a fairly sizable business for us, and we're heading into much bigger numbers," according to AT&T supply chain GM Susan Johnson, quoted in the report.
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At the time of writing, copper was worth about $10,000 per metric ton – close to breaking an all-time high for modern times. Should prices continue to rise, the total value of recycled copper wires could easily increase by hundreds of millions of dollars – once you get it out of the ground and process it, that is. ®
Editor's note: This article was revised to correct the estimated value of copper wire recycled by AT&T.
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[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/telcos-hunt-down-billions-worth-of-buried-copper-as-prices-soar
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/nec_ntt_multicore_fibre_networks/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zln0JjOIvytDemTeTcBM3AAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zln0JjOIvytDemTeTcBM3AAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zln0JjOIvytDemTeTcBM3AAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/15/netzero_emissions_copper/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/21/ewaste_grows/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/gsma_smartphone_recycling_plan/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/01/norway_copper_landlines_shutdown/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/europe_deepest_mine_battery/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zln0JjOIvytDemTeTcBM3AAAAIs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "should they take the trouble to recycle them"
Yup, the growth industry here in Catalunya is heaving the copper used for railway train power. Man are they dedicated to recycling. Every day the news has a story of another track not working.
Re: "should they take the trouble to recycle them"
If the lines are powered it's to be hoped that a few of the thieves are getting recycled as well.
Re: "should they take the trouble to recycle them"
A site I look after, which though the power-station is long gone, still has live cables on it.
Two would be thieves got themselves killed trying to decommission them for us, and at least one further has horrendous burns and missing fingers that were still attached to the hacksaw they were using.
Somebody's going to be awfully disappointed when they come across the aluminium stuff.
Why hello Milton Keynes, didn't see you there!
I'm lucky in that my telephone lines pre-date that stuff. However the 3-phas in the road must have been an aluminium era replacement. Not the main conductors, just the sheaf which carries neutral. The failures are getting more recent. A few have affected the entire cable, the rest just individual households' connections.
The latest, a couple of weeks ago was fun. A more recent gas main replacement had been laid over the top of the cable. In places the road is built up over solid rock and nobody wants to dig it up. The replaced gas main had been fun too. Contrary to all the records it turned out that the original had been brought across what had been fields from a parallel road. Because nobody knew it was there it had acquired someone's conservatory built over it. GIS is great but only when it's correct.
Financially viable?
Given the current price of copper (around 4 GBP/kg) and the average weight of typical copper wire (around 0.02kg/metre) then you will need around 200m of wire to hit 4 quid. This is without all the costs of collecting it, transporting it, melting it, selling it + all the other admin and people costs. So unless you happen to have some big reels of the thick stuff in your shed the economics look very challenging. Also, if you are slapping a load of it into the supply chain that is going to depress the price making it even more challenging to make a profit, no?
Re: Financially viable?
BT were reported recently to have estimated they can recover 200,000 tonnes from the UK network (and there's reason to believe that's both a considerable underestimate, and based on the trunk and many-core stuff, not reliant on silly estimates of recovering the twisted pair to each property). I suspect the biggest challenge for telcos is legally, safely and economically stripping the insulation, as the ratio of insulation to copper isn't very good on telephone wires, but at least in high volume that can be automated.
Obviously they won't offload that other in a period of years, but potentially that's near enough a billion quid less recovery and processing costs.
Re: Cable stripping
In a local charity shop last week, I came across one of those Chinese-style cardboard packets, unusually heavy. On a closer look at the labelling, it proved to be a contraption of wheels, blades and apertures designed for stripping long bits of cable. Not having enough time for the hobbies I've got, I left it for someone else to take up cable stripping for fun and profit, but I did wonder who the target market was, and why it was languishing among the pottery labradors and microwave egg poachers.
Don't give them ideas...
People of a certain persuasion are already doing a fine job of recuperating copper in cables. Don't tell them there are billions to be made or the place will be stripped...
The Register covered this years ago [1]pointing out that BT's copper was worth more than the Company ...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/22/bt_copper_cable_theft/
That's reasonable because you'd have to factor in the costs of recovering the copper not to mention all the overhead of BT manglement costs.
Was immediately reminded of that story myself when I saw the headline.
Resident el reg Transmission engineer here.
Considering I wrote the policy on decommissioning chonky AC cables; I have a few thoughts about this! There is quite a chunk of redundant/obsolete/unmaintainable cable scattered around the UK. Induced current is of course a thing, so dead cable still needs care to work around.
The sorts of things I wrote the policy to cover were filled with oil when they were operating, so even decades after disposal we still have to think about them. Draining them off and/or forcibly displacing the oil with nitrogen gets you so far but doesn't entirely remove the risk of leaking, if you're gonna leave the cables there. We even experimented with biologics to eat and breakdown the cable oil; though this is not the default as it tends to create a gas build up that can itself be hazardous.
We dabbled with u/g robotics to follow the cable sheath and loosen it off so it could be pulled out in sections. This can work in some cases, but forget it for things embedded in very heavy cement. Digging up is of course possible; but society usually has a few things to say about roadworks.
Recycled copper, while valuable, isn't as valuable as virgin copper either. The reason being that recyc is inevitably contaminated to some extent with something else. In critical applications, virgin copper is more predictable in the sense you might not have a bunch of aluminium or iron lumped in with it buggering up your performance calculations.
If someone can come up with a good way to recover them, I'm all ears. Until then, the cost / risk / societal benefit even against mile-high copper prices usually says leave them alone.
Aaaahh yes old school transformer oil riddled with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)...."fun" stuff...
Thankfully our buried equipment hasn't got any of that in it, it's mostly a synthetic mineral oil and relatively harmless (naturally occuring bacteria will break the stuff down, though you still don't want to be spilling it by the bucket).
Transformers on the other hand, yeah, rightfully paranoid. A lot of equipment has to be cleaned or disposed imminently to go along with the Stockholm convention.
There could be some 'quick wins'
But the companies which had 'head office' office blocks, and just upgraded their copper networks over the decades without actually removing the old under floor cabling first should be able to get a 'quick win'. Years ago I heard of one which closed their building over a weekend and removed 14 tonnes of old unused copper cabling from one site.
Re: There could be some 'quick wins'
An old IBM data centre I used to work at had about 4 feet deep of old cable under the floor - not one ever touched it - just cut the ends off and dropped it through the floor tiles... Much easier to run a new cable than to unpick it from the industrial-sized spaghetti farm under the floor. .
recycling with bonus lead and asbestos.
good luck removing the copper safely when its run through asbestos and lead piping/conduit.
"should they take the trouble to recycle them"
Why bother ?
Copper thieves have been taking care of that for a decade already . . .
Telcos are not renowned for proper management of their hardware anyway, now are they ?