(VitalNews.org) – Cable manufacturers are beginning to recycle more as the demand for copper continues to rise. The Nexans Mill in Montreal is one of the businesses now using lots of used copper material in manufacturing their products. This particular mill has been making copper rods for centuries, but now most of their rods contain at least fourteen percent recycled material and their goal is to get it to twenty percent.
Nexans CEO Christopher Guérin said, “We say to our customers: Your waste of today, your scrap of today is your energy of tomorrow, so bring back your scrap.”
This industry has been reusing and recycling copper for many years, but they are stepping up their game as the need for metal is expected to double by 2035. Experts have also said that the goal to move away from fossil fuels will also mean that everything will be electrical, which in turn means there will be a need for more copper.
It’s said that for every ton of copper that’s recycled two hundred tons of rock won’t need to be mined to retrieve that copper. Guérin said that copper is a great material to recycle because it can be reused many different times and it won’t lose its value or its usability.
On a daily basis, there are about ten trucks that drop off bare wire, cable, and copper scraps at the Nexans mill. This is the world’s largest wire and cable manufacturer and they use more than twenty-five hundred times the weight of the Statue of Liberty in copper every year.
“We depend on electricity for everything now,” Guérin said. “None of it works without copper.”
“It increases the supply available. It reduces the energy and environmental impacts associated with new mining by being able to reuse material we’ve already mined. It’s an important step,” said the program coordinator for the USGS Mineral Resources Program Colin Williams.
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