UK households should go ‘urban mining’ and recycle unused cables, phone chargers and other old tech to help stave off a looming shortage of copper, says the Recycle Your Electricals campaign.
Copper mines are struggling to produce enough of the red metal to meet growing global demand.
Analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence shows an increasing gap between the amount of copper produced and demand for the raw product. It estimates that globally there will be a 6.5 million tonnes gap by 2033.
However, the same report also identifies that better recycling of copper could potentially meet the additional demand.
A recent study by Recycle Your Electricals, a UK-wide campaign from independent not-for-profit organisation Material Focus, shows that if UK households had to look in their ‘drawer of doom’ – a box or bag of forgotten electrical items – we would go some way to staving off the copper shortage.
The study reveals that approximately 823 million unused or broken tech items are lurking in our homes, which could contain as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper – including 627 million cables.
This amounts to as much as £266m worth of copper, enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK to achieve a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030.
According to the study, cables represent one of the UK’s biggest e-waste challenges – and one of the biggest copper opportunities as UK households are throwing away or holding onto an average of 23 cables.
The total number of electrical cables hoarded in UK homes could circle the earth more than five times.
Scott Butler, executive director of Recycle Your Electricals, said: “We need to start ‘urban mining’ and help protect the planet and nature from the harmful impacts of mining for raw materials and instead value and use what we have already.
“People may not realise that cables and electricals contain valuable materials, not just copper, and that if binned or stashed, we lose everything inside of them when we don’t recycle them into something new.”
Analysis from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), which is supporting this campaign, shows that if the UK is to meet its ambitions of increasing wind and solar power generation it needs an increased amount of vital materials such as copper.
Izzi Monk, RSC policy adviser for the environment, said: ”Upping secondary sourcing of copper through recycling is a really important route towards greater supply security – the government needs to invest in technologies and infrastructure to make sure recycling can be grown without creating worse environmental, social and health impacts.
“As a nation, if we can crack the formula for recycling the copper we already have, we can make a real difference for the future of our planet.”
The campaign is calling on households, businesses, retailers and other establishments such as schools to clear out their ‘drawers of doom’ on International E-Waste Day 2024 (14 October) and take these items to one of more than 26,000 recycling points around the UK.
