Urban Mines of Copper: Size and Potential for Recycling in the EU

Ivano Vassura,Luca Ciacci,Fabrizio Passarini

doi:10.3390/resources6010006

Abstract

Copper is among the most important metals by production volume and variety of applications, providing essential materials and goods for human wellbeing. Compared to other world regions, Europe has modest natural reserves of copper and is highly dependent on imports to meet the domestic demand. Securing access to raw materials is of strategic relevance for Europe and the recycling of urban mines (also named “in-use stock”) is a significant mean to provide forms of secondary copper to the European industry. A dynamic material flow analysis model is applied to characterize the flows of copper in the European Union (EU-28) from 1960 to 2014 and to determine the accumulation of this metal in the in-use stock. A scrap balance approach is applied to reconcile the flow of secondary copper sent to domestic recycling estimated through the model and that reported by historic statistics. The results show that per capita in-use stock amounts at 160–200 kg/person, and that current end-of-life recycling rate is around 60%. The quantification of historic flows provides a measure of how the European copper cycle has changed over time and how it may evolve in the future: major hindrances to recycling are highlighted and perspectives for improving the current practices at end-of-life are discussed.

Highlights

Copper (Cu) is among the most important metals by production volume and variety of applications, providing essential materials and goods for human wellbeing
Securing access to raw materials is of strategic relevance for Europe and in 2010 the European Commission (EC) created a methodology [3] to classify raw materials deemed critical on the basis of two indicators: the economic importance of a given material in the European economy and its potential supply risk
None of the two assessments identified Cu as a critical raw material for Europe: overall, a medium economic importance is attributed to Cu but a negligible supply risk is computed for this metal [3,4]

Summary

Introduction

Copper (Cu) is among the most important metals by production volume and variety of applications, providing essential materials and goods for human wellbeing. Securing access to raw materials is of strategic relevance for Europe and in 2010 the European Commission (EC) created a methodology [3] to classify raw materials deemed critical on the basis of two indicators: the economic importance of a given material in the European economy and its potential supply risk. None of the two assessments identified Cu as a critical raw material for Europe: overall, a medium economic importance is attributed to Cu but a negligible supply risk is computed for this metal [3,4]. Other methodologies have been developed in the past years by governments and institutions and the criticality evaluation is performed considering more or less similar dimensions (i.e., economic relevance, supply risk, and environmental implications), the way in which indicators are calculated varies considerably method by method [5,6,7,8,9]. When other factors that can Resources 2017, 6, 6; doi:10.3390/resources6010006 www.mdpi.com/journal/resources

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Conclusion