Your junk is needed for the new electric era

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. ROUYN-NORANDA, Quebec—One of the world’s largest miners is digging into America’s junk drawers, old phones and landfills. The quarry: bits of copper to meet the needs of the energy transition and data boom.

Shredded cellphones, obsolete computer cables and chewed-up cars are heaped 30 feet high outside Glencore’s 97-year-old copper smelter deep in Canada’s sparsely populated boreal forest. There, the scrap is melted with copper concentrate from mines to produce fresh slabs of metal. Old electronics have long augmented the smelter’s input.

But these days Glencore and other copper producers are casting wider nets for scrap and spending big to boost recycling capacity. Shifting from fossil fuels to more renewable electricity promises to remake commodity markets. If America requires less crude oil and coal, it will in turn need a lot more lithium for electric-vehicle batteries, precisely shaped pine trees for bigger utility poles—and copper for everything electric.

“In the next 25 years we will consume more copper than humanity has consumed until now," said Kunal Sinha, Glencore’s global head of recycling. “That’s the scale of the challenge." Copper consumption surged in recent decades as China modernized. Demand got another boost from 2022’s climate and tax law, which promotes renewable energy development in the U.S.

The data centers being built to facilitate artificial intelligence and store smartphone videos are full of copper. So are the phones. Glencore estimates that global copper supply must grow by about one million metric tons a year through 2050.