Click here for the entire series about copper: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/24/Travels-with-Copper/
It’s not far off. So, why aren’t there more operations like this one in BC’s north? Fifth in a series.
FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. — The stretch of Highway 97 in the northeastern B.C. Interior between Dawson Creek and Fort St. John is an odd place for a two-kilometre traffic jam — until you consider that this roadway straddles a resource boom.
Gregg Drury is idling his pick-up on a July morning amid logging trucks, oil field suppliers and RVs, trying to get to the metal salvage yard he operates for ABC Recycling near Fort St. John. He’s doing a huge business these days buying all the metal discarded from old farms, local residents, and more than anything else, the oil patch.
“They’re generating incredible amounts of waste up here,” he says. “From pipelines, I get all that steel, but when they tear a plant down for instance, there’s lots of aluminum, stainless steel, and excess copper and wire.”
The metal salvage yard buys thousands of pounds of copper each day. It’s a tiny part of the business by volume, but huge in dollar value. Steel fetches about eight cents a pound, aluminum about 40 cents; copper, anywhere from $2 to 2.40.
Drury is both a newcomer and anomaly to the metal recycling business. In a past life he was a wilderness tourism guide who co-founded a tiny environmental group in B.C.’s remote northwest to sound the alarm about the potential impacts of mining the province’s nascent copper belt. He has seen first-hand the effect of copper mining on big rivers, and considers his latest career a chance to be part of a solution.
“When we’ve already expended enormous resources to harvest copper from the earth’s crust, it only makes sense to use it as many times as we possibly can,” he says. “In my tenure here, if I can divert 10 to 20 million pounds of waste metal back into productive use, then that’s something real.”
Recycling is mining
ABC’s Fort St. John operation buys copper by the pound, bales it up and trucks it to Vancouver, where it’s sold to downstream recycling companies and metal smelters all over the world. Like the raw ore mined in places like Copper Mountain near Princeton, much of this raw material leaves British Columbia on ships destined for Asia.
Instead of digging open pits, recycling businesses scour urban and industrial landscapes for reusable metals. But the commodity they produce ultimately competes in the same global marketplace as companies mining virgin ore, sharing their windfalls and misfortunes.
The difference is, reusing scrap metal negates many of the environmental liabilities inherent in digging raw ore from the earth. Take copper: much of the world’s remaining supply is present only in tiny concentrations, necessitating moving of mountains of often acid-generating rock. The energy needed for this is immense. Depending on the metal and form of the scrap, recycling a kilogram takes between one-tenth and one-twentieth of the energy needed to mine and refine a kilogram of virgin ore.
Coal provides the primary energy of choice in many of the world’s copper mining operations — the vast quantities of greenhouse gases it emits not only stokes climate change, but is also likely to become an increasing financial cost for those mines, as many countries move toward putting a price on carbon emissions.
These liabilities are often presented as necessary tradeoffs we all make to enjoy a high standard of living. Citizens of the developed world are all complicit. And there is no better example than copper: it is an indispensible ingredient in almost everything associated with a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Modern housing, lighting, transportation, communications and electronics — none could exist without copper.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/28/Peak-Copper/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=310314