Ryan Dezember of The Wall Street Journal reports that the concentration of copper in landfilled auto fluff can be more than twice that found in geologic mines. Dezember writes:
One of the world’s largest miners is digging into America’s junk drawers, old phones and landfills. The quarry: bits of copper to meet the needs of the energy transition and data boom.
Shredded cellphones, obsolete computer cables and chewed-up cars are heaped 30 feet high outside Glencore’s 97-year-old copper smelter deep in Canada’s sparsely populated boreal forest. There, the scrap is melted with copper concentrate from mines to produce fresh slabs of metal. […]
“In the next 25 years we will consume more copper than humanity has consumed until now,” said Kunal Sinha, Glencore’s global head of recycling. “That’s the scale of the challenge.” […]
Glencore already buys copper stripped from cars before they are shredded. Its suppliers are starting to excavate landfills packed with fluff to get the copper that wasn’t worth the trouble for earlier scrappers. In trials, Glencore found that the concentration of copper in landfilled auto fluff can be more than twice that found in geologic mines.
The scrap piled up in Quebec is shredded further and fed into the smelter, where temperatures reach 1,200 degrees Celsius. Scrap usually makes up about 15% of the input, Sinha said. The smelter’s chief metallurgist blends it with concentrate from mines, accounting for plastic and other materials that affect the process’s heat and chemistry. […]
Eventually, 750-pound anodes are formed by pouring molten metal into a revolving casting wheel. The red-hot slabs are hung to cool, then hauled 400 miles to Glencore’s Montreal refinery. There, they are melted anew to remove and collect the remaining traces of other metals: platinum, palladium, silver and gold.
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