Abstract
AbstractResource efficiency strategies are emerging on policy agendas worldwide. Commonly, resource efficiency policies aim at decreasing losses at the waste management stage and, thus, diverge from public interest in more comprehensive resource efficiency measures that include a focus the earlier material life cycle stages. Just in recent years, improvements in the lifetimes of products and increased repair and reuse ability have become policy objectives in some countries. However, the effectiveness of policy measures is usually not assessed, even though it is crucial to support informed policy‐making and efficiently decrease the environmental impact of resource use. In this paper, we provide such an assessment for the copper cycle, the third most consumed metal with sharply increasing demand. Under current practices, in Western Europe and North America, 50% and 44% of the losses by 2050 occur at end‐of‐life collection, and only 2% of losses take place at the recovery stage; in Middle East and Africa for 19% and 54%, respectively. By 2050, most copper would be lost in China with a proportion of 58%. We evaluate the resource efficiency by quantifying the two key parameters, circularity and longevity, that is, how often and how long the material is in use in the anthroposphere. Our results show that the current global longevity of high‐grade copper is 47 ± 2.5 years, and a copper atom is used in 2.1 ± 0.1 applications on average. Ambitious political measures across the life cycle can increase longevity by 85% and circularity by 45%.
Highlights
In 2009, Rockström et al (2009) introduced the concept of planetary boundaries to define the environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate
Under business as usual (BAU) (Figure 3a), the amount of copper in the infrastructure sector and the building and construction sector is rising in the first 15–25 years due to the long average lifetimes in these sectors and secondary copper entering the cycle again. This secondary copper mainly originates from recycled copper scrap, leaving the use phase from products from the Consumer & Electronics, the Transport, and the Industry sectors with shorter average lifetimes
The Consumer & Electronics sector has a rapid decrease of embodied secondary copper from 2015 due to short lifetimes compared to products in the other sectors and inefficient waste management practices
Summary
In 2009, Rockström et al (2009) introduced the concept of planetary boundaries to define the environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate. CO2 emissions of primary refined copper, including the mining, shipping, smelting, and refining stages, average between 1.6 and 3.4 tonnes (t) CO2/t copper (Farrell, 2009; Grimes, Donaldson, & Gomez, 2008) and account for 0.3% of today’s global energy consumption (Fizaine & Court, 2015). This share might increase up to 2.4% by 2050 (Elshkaki, Graedel, Ciacci, & Reck, 2016). Among all mass metals, primary copper production has the highest environmental impact per kilogram of produced metal in four categories: eutrophication, land use, photochemical oxidation, and freshwater aquatic eco-toxicity (OECD, 2019)
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