Question: why should we recycle copper and are there any problems with recycling copper?

Andrew Maynard answered on 24 Jun 2010:

Hi imnotsureaboutbeardedhedgehogs,

Interesting question. In general, recycling anything is a good idea, as there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of anything we use. I don’t know that much about copper though.

Doing a bit of research on this, there’s a huge supply of copper still available in the Earth’s crust, but a lot of it is too expensive to extract. At the same time, the rate at which we are using copper is increasing – I suspect because it’s the main metal we use to conduct electricity, so it is essential in anything electrical. So it makes sense to reuse old copper, rather than dig new stuff out of the ground.