Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
332 points (83.9% liked)
Technology
70440 readers
3095 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.
Its possible to just coat the surface if that's the effect needed. I was so happy a year ago that I had found copper Ethernet wire. However upon inspection recently the wire is basically aluminum coated in copper. Usually, platers will first clean the surface and then electro less coat nickel on aluminum. Then you can coat other things like copper. Aluminum forms an oxide almost instantly in normal atmosphere so its difficult to coat with anything. But electroless nickel works very well after an HCl bath or a nitric bath.
We just need to use it in smart ways
We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying
Didn't China just punt off a ticket to some asteroids? Viability tests maybe?
-
We do have enough copper
-
Copper can be replaced with other materials in many applications
While we should always be careful about how we expend natural resources, we should not fall into sensationalism.
Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)
Ea-Nasir treats his customers and the world with contempt.
This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:
Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.
This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.
That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism's need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered "demand creation" (through advertising) and now even "growth hacking" to supercharge this process. It has made us more wasteful than ever. We are headed into a wall.
load more comments
(8 replies)
What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:
Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.
Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.
“First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”
Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be ... just in renewable power plants?
This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.
I'm not defending the article, but I think most overhead power lines are aluminium, which is probably good as it's abundant compared to copper.
Aluminium is very commonly used. It isn't near as good a conductor as copper, but you can easilly use more toeget results and in most cases that works fine.
The reason we stopped using aluminimun more is it is relly tricky. when you tighten a screw the al deforms over time and so you don't get a lasting connection. Al also corrodes to a non conductive state. Many house fires were traced to al wiring in just the few years it was common. We can mitigate all the above issuses but it takes care and so copper is preferred despite al being much cheaper.
They stopped putting aluminum in homes, because it has a tendency to overheat more. The aluminum expands and contracts with load more than copper, which can loosen contact points and encourage oxidation, which then increases resistance and heat. Hot wires in the walls and outlet boxes are no bueno.
load more comments
(2 replies)
In a lot of cases you can also use Aluminum instead of copper. You need thicker wires and it's less flexible, but it's doable and cheaper. Some old electric motors from the eastern block used aluminium coils for that matter, because copper was much more expensive there.
Aluminium is actually a better conductor than copper when you judge it by mass, not volume. I think also by tensile strength.
In any case there's a reason that large overland wires aren't copper, but steel-cladded aluminium. Copper will always have its applications but so does gold and yet we're not running out of gold to plate connections with.
In cases like windings requiring more volume is actually an issue, in the case of PCBs... no, despite Apple's insistence, it's actually fine to have a phone that's 0.2mm thicker.
The US is allergic to it, but needs to get over it.
Aluminum wire was tried in the 1970s due to a spike in copper prices. The problem was that they just tried to swap it right in. Aluminum and copper have different rates of expansion. Over time, that would slowly loosen the connectors, and the wires would pop right out and cause a fire.
You can design connectors to handle both, and you'll see many electrical things today specify that they're good for aluminum or copper wire. It still has a bad reputation among electricians; they haven't unlearned the problem yet.
Now, one place it's more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.
load more comments
(3 replies)
-
The article is shit, the study is about copper used for reducing fossil-fuel power generation. It is basing the projected use of copper on windmills and especially large batteries.
-
Those high-powered and long distance power lines are made aluminium and steel.
load more comments
(6 replies)
You're wrong in terms of long distance power lines being mostly copper, but this does seem a lot like fossil fuel propaganda.
Motors, generators, and transformers can be built using aluminium; they're just a bit bulkier and less efficient. Very common practice.
It looks like CCA might be making its way back into house wiring in the near future, with much lower risks than the 70s aluminium scare.
The big thing is that batteries really should be a last resort, behind demand response (using power when it is available, rather than storing it for later), long distance transmission, and public transport instead of private vehicles.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
-
this website is cancer. I'm I'm mobile and counted 6 ads in my view with space left for 3 lines of text. Don't post crap like this. Yes, i normally use an ad blocker but this is inside the connect app
-
it could be theess of a website but i saw no link to a peer reviewed publication, so i think its safe to assume were good with he cooper
How much old copper piping is still out there that could be replaced by other materials to recover the copper? I'm sure there are other common obsolete applications. The nice thing about metals is that we already have a pretty robust recycling chain in place for them. That plus the remaining supply plus aluminium plus other replacements plus careful design to minimize the use of copper where it's absolutely necessary might be enough to carry us through.
Aluminum is a substitute for copper in any straight wiring application. PEX for domestic piping.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Well couldn't we, like, share it? The average joe in america is consuming 100 times more than an indian
But that would be unfair to the average Joe! And think about the billionaires; how would they survive if everything was shared? /s
Good think we can use aluminum and copper then...
This all suggests that we keep producing, wasting and manufacturing things infinitely without ever recycling, reusing or re purposing everything that we are mining out of the ground. The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.
If we keep running our world the way we are now for the next hundred yes .... than yes, we are going to run out of everything because we live in an absolutely wasteful society that only runs in a way to produce things designed with planned obsolescence to break down in a short amount of time so that we can produce more junk to sell and drive a stupid economy to make a small group of idiots even more wealthy. The whole system is designed to run on making infinite money by producing infinite junk that doesn't last long.
Yes at the rate we are going and the way we are producing things and the way we shape our economy and the way we base our manufacturing .... we are definitely going to run out of everything.
We can change our economy and the way we produce and manufacture things - and get rid of this stupid structure of society of just endlessly making money for a small group of morons .... or we can keep doing things the way we are now until we run off a cliff and destroy everything and drive our species into extinction.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.
That alternative material is aluminum. It's like a top four abundance material in the crust. It's just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don't like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.
Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.
If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it'll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
There could be two ways to address this problem. One is asteroid mining, which has the potential to be extremely lucrative because there are lots of asteroids with huge metal deposits.
Another is discovering new conductors. There's been progress in developing conductive plastics. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-scientists-material-plastic-metal.html
view more: next ›