The Monumental Copper Disconnect – by Christopher Pollon (TheTyee.ca – March 28, 2014)

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Click here for the entire series about copper: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/24/Travels-with-Copper/

Billions to mine, refine and assemble into products that last maybe a year or so? Last in a series.

LANGLEY, B.C. — Not long ago this industrial park was farmland: now it’s home to a virtual mine harvesting metal, plastic and glass from all the electronics British Columbians throw away.

For anyone who has ever disposed of a cell phone, hair dryer or appliance at a B.C. drop-off box, this is where some of it goes: a graveyard of sorts, where “end-of-life” products take the first step toward life anew. In any given month, a million pounds of “e-waste” comes through this plant alone.

Cindy Coutts is the President of Sims Canada, a subsidiary of the biggest urban “mining” company on earth. Walking through the Walmart-sized plant (which will double to 60,000 square feet this year), she grabs a printed circuit board the size of a coffee table book and holds it up. Gold and copper gleam against a green backing.

“Smelters love this,” she says. “This board is higher grade copper and gold than ore you would dig out of the ground, and requires 80 per cent less energy than virgin metal to refine.”

While an open pit mine might harvest a single metal with trace amounts of others, this urban mother lode contains more than 25 separate globally-traded commodity streams. The real business for a company like Sims is to figure out where all 25 materials need to go — other than a landfill. And as Coutts makes clear, it’s not just Sims’ job to figure all of that out.

“As a society, we haven’t gotten our heads around the idea that consumer products need to be managed at end of life too,” she says. “Right now, I’m a bit cynical. Joe just wants to go to Best Buy and pick up a cheap TV.”

Resurrecting cell phones

Coutts leads me to a box containing thousands of cell phones — a mosaic of every colour, size and age, from recent iPhones to early commercial models from the mid-1990s. One prehistoric Motorola, including uncollapsable antennae, stretches from my elbow to finger tips, weighing about five pounds.

Sims is one of five companies currently contracted by Recycle My Cell, a not-for-profit created by wireless manufacturers and service providers to recycle phones and other electronic devices across Canada. This is the end of the road for phones and other appliances; nothing here will be reused as-is. After any battery is removed, they will be shredded into small chunks to enable the separation of materials — including glass, aluminum, plastic, and copper. The fragments are then sorted with magnets and other technologies to further separate ferrous from non-ferrous metals.

“The life cycle continues when we ship it to one of eight global smelters,” says Coutts, who says there are currently just this many big corporate smelters capable of refining the copper and precious metals contained in a cell phone.

One of these is the Teck smelter at Trail B.C. Another is Mitsubishi Material Corporation’s Naoshima Island smelter near Osaka, Japan — the same place where a lot of virgin ore from B.C.’s Copper Mountain, Huckleberry, and Highland Valley copper mines is also smelted.

For the rest of this article, click here: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/28/Copper-Disconnect/?utm_campaign=map