Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos Increasingly redundant copper wires may be worth over $7 billion to telecommunications firms, should they take the trouble to recycle them. The estimate comes from British engineering company TXO, which claims there's up to 800,000 metric tons of copper wiring that could be harvested in the next ten years. TXO claims over a …
A site I look after, which though the power-station is long gone, still has live cables on it.
Two would be thieves got themselves killed trying to decommission them for us, and at least one further has horrendous burns and missing fingers that were still attached to the hacksaw they were using.
Most "copper theft" is BY the Telco itself.
Steal copper, blame "them criminals"....
Even though its physically impossible for such large amounts of cable to be stolen as it would require MASSIVE trucks just to hold the weight and these vehicles are NEVER seen on CCTV......
I'm lucky in that my telephone lines pre-date that stuff. However the 3-phas in the road must have been an aluminium era replacement. Not the main conductors, just the sheaf which carries neutral. The failures are getting more recent. A few have affected the entire cable, the rest just individual households' connections.
The latest, a couple of weeks ago was fun. A more recent gas main replacement had been laid over the top of the cable. In places the road is built up over solid rock and nobody wants to dig it up. The replaced gas main had been fun too. Contrary to all the records it turned out that the original had been brought across what had been fields from a parallel road. Because nobody knew it was there it had acquired someone's conservatory built over it. GIS is great but only when it's correct.
@Doctor Syntax:
What you're describing is pretty usual (especially for new-ish builds), and we call it dual trenching. It really saves time, effort, and most of all *money* if done correctly. "If done correctly" carries a whole lot of weight in that statement, unfortunately. As to the GIS part, anything built pre 1994 (in my neck of the woods) has GIS data that's just wishful thinking. The best part is when PVC was starting to gain a foothold in utilities, but nobody gave a thought to properly locating them in the future (plastics don't radiate RF, which the locators use to actually *find* the lines). Where I work, there are entire swathes of fairly dense urban area that just require what our locators describe as "precision guesswork" as the maps are less than useless, dimensions are just seemingly random values, and are non-radiating. The newer non-resonant lines have a metal wire run down them in order to act as an antenna, but those are far less common than one would wish.
"Why hello Milton Keynes, didn't see you there!"
From bitter experience I know sections of Leeds also had this.
Every six months I'd have to travel up to the branch to beat BT over the head with a large stick when yet again another tail eventually failed.
After 6 years they ran out of unused cables to try to "fix" the issue and finally ripped the whole lot out.
No no, he's forgiven them now, because they make a cool hat.
Given the current price of copper (around 4 GBP/kg) and the average weight of typical copper wire (around 0.02kg/metre) then you will need around 200m of wire to hit 4 quid. This is without all the costs of collecting it, transporting it, melting it, selling it + all the other admin and people costs. So unless you happen to have some big reels of the thick stuff in your shed the economics look very challenging. Also, if you are slapping a load of it into the supply chain that is going to depress the price making it even more challenging to make a profit, no?
BT were reported recently to have estimated they can recover 200,000 tonnes from the UK network (and there's reason to believe that's both a considerable underestimate, and based on the trunk and many-core stuff, not reliant on silly estimates of recovering the twisted pair to each property). I suspect the biggest challenge for telcos is legally, safely and economically stripping the insulation, as the ratio of insulation to copper isn't very good on telephone wires, but at least in high volume that can be automated.
Obviously they won't offload that other in a period of years, but potentially that's near enough a billion quid less recovery and processing costs.
In a local charity shop last week, I came across one of those Chinese-style cardboard packets, unusually heavy. On a closer look at the labelling, it proved to be a contraption of wheels, blades and apertures designed for stripping long bits of cable. Not having enough time for the hobbies I've got, I left it for someone else to take up cable stripping for fun and profit, but I did wonder who the target market was, and why it was languishing among the pottery labradors and microwave egg poachers.
the biggest challenge for telcos is legally, safely and economically stripping the insulation, as the ratio of insulation to copper isn't very good on telephone wires, but at least in high volume that can be automated
Or more likely outsourced to China, where some poor villagers will burn the insulation off on bonfires and then return the remaining copper slag for refining.
Which really is borderline insane - shellfish are fished in (e.g. European waters), shipped to china to be deshelled with cheap labour, to be shipped back to the origin as that's cheaper than simply deshelling at origin. Point being labour in China can be stupidly cheap, so these cheap labourers go the fun way of burning the wires rather than stripping by hand. Well I guess not insane, simply good economics in accordance with the local environmental policy.
Meanwhile in the EU we've got to suffer plastic caps that stay attached when unscrewed because apparently the separate caps seem to always end up in the sea (isn't that always the argument, plastic bags... everything ends in the sea). Can't say I've ever taken the cap off and left it separate from the bottle when finished and I don't know anyone else who does, but seemingly somebody takes joy in separating the two and then throwing the separate cap into the ocean rather than leaving the cap attached and throwing the bottle and cap together into the ocean.
I think your calculation may be off a bit. Remember that telcos will run cables, not wires. From a google search, a 100 pair cable weighs something like 0.476 #/ft on up depending on the wire size. Of course, you'd need to subtract the weight of the insulation, cladding, etc.
(Something like 0.708 kg/m if I did the conversion correctly...)
《Given the current price of copper (around 4 GBP/kg) and the average weight of typical copper wire (around 0.02kg/metre) then you will need around 200m of wire 》
Kilograms, metres and unambiguous currency denomination.
A relief from the ambiguous dollars which half the globe uses (USD, CAD, AUD, SGD, HKD?), and the feet and pounds (or yds and cwt) which none of the saner parts of the globe uses.
The Register covered this years ago pointing out that BT's copper was worth more than the Company...
Resident el reg Transmission engineer here.
Considering I wrote the policy on decommissioning chonky AC cables; I have a few thoughts about this! There is quite a chunk of redundant/obsolete/unmaintainable cable scattered around the UK. Induced current is of course a thing, so dead cable still needs care to work around.
The sorts of things I wrote the policy to cover were filled with oil when they were operating, so even decades after disposal we still have to think about them. Draining them off and/or forcibly displacing the oil with nitrogen gets you so far but doesn't entirely remove the risk of leaking, if you're gonna leave the cables there. We even experimented with biologics to eat and breakdown the cable oil; though this is not the default as it tends to create a gas build up that can itself be hazardous.
We dabbled with u/g robotics to follow the cable sheath and loosen it off so it could be pulled out in sections. This can work in some cases, but forget it for things embedded in very heavy cement. Digging up is of course possible; but society usually has a few things to say about roadworks.
Recycled copper, while valuable, isn't as valuable as virgin copper either. The reason being that recyc is inevitably contaminated to some extent with something else. In critical applications, virgin copper is more predictable in the sense you might not have a bunch of aluminium or iron lumped in with it buggering up your performance calculations.
If someone can come up with a good way to recover them, I'm all ears. Until then, the cost / risk / societal benefit even against mile-high copper prices usually says leave them alone.
Thankfully our buried equipment hasn't got any of that in it, it's mostly a synthetic mineral oil and relatively harmless (naturally occuring bacteria will break the stuff down, though you still don't want to be spilling it by the bucket).
Transformers on the other hand, yeah, rightfully paranoid. A lot of equipment has to be cleaned or disposed imminently to go along with the Stockholm convention.
But the companies which had 'head office' office blocks, and just upgraded their copper networks over the decades without actually removing the old under floor cabling first should be able to get a 'quick win'. Years ago I heard of one which closed their building over a weekend and removed 14 tonnes of old unused copper cabling from one site.
An old IBM data centre I used to work at had about 4 feet deep of old cable under the floor - not one ever touched it - just cut the ends off and dropped it through the floor tiles... Much easier to run a new cable than to unpick it from the industrial-sized spaghetti farm under the floor. .
"unpick it from the industrial-sized spaghetti farm"
Amen to that. The place I used to work at made telecoms switching and transmission stuff, and we had rows and rows of racks (AKA 'Suites') containing the bits and bobs that made up an exchange. All of this was on top of raised flooring, under which the inter-rack/suite electrical/fibre cabling was run. Over time the underfloor space became so congested with redundant cables that the underfloor fire detection system was useless, and in some areas was damaged by the weight of cables casually chucked onto the pile to the point where the fire sensors got crushed. No-one ever decommissioned the cabling when moving stuff, just piled more on top. It got to the point that there was no longer any space even when lifting the floor tiles up one-by-one along the new cable route, so we had to resort to shoving a pipe or solid rod through the underfloor mass with a drawstring attached, and then pull a jacketed bundle of wires/fibres through the hole it made. Hardest part was completing the cable pull before the hole closed up!
I was there long enough to remember the time where there was space available, and you could crawl underfloor towing a bunch of cables behind you. Way more fun that lifting floor tiles, plus you got to scare the bejebers our of people by lifting a tile from underneath and coming up right next to them. At one point, I'd just been involved in locating some 'vital' cabling from years ago (I was the one who installed it) and had to go to a meeting covered in all the underfloor sh1t that had accumulated since installation. All so someone could get 2xE1 service to 'Softswitch Live' :-)
Fun times.
《Years ago I heard of one which closed their building over a weekend and removed 14 tonnes of old unused copper cabling from one site.》
Some years ago a 5 storey building on campus had its network spine replaced by fiber. The cablers left in place the generations of rs232 cable, thicknet (10base5), thinnet (10base2) and twisted pair (10baseT) as well as the cctv/5mbit broadband coax, but the network engineer estimated there was about 20 tonnes of copper just in the spine.
I imagine its a similar case in the just under 100 building on campus. In one building in the vertical voids the various generations of abandoned data cabling were just freely hanging like fruit for the harvest. :)
Potentially why demolition can often be relatively cheap. They make their profits on the separation and recycling of the "debris" when they clear the site. Mostly steel from rebar and girders, but I probably quite a bit of copper too. I've heard demo companies describe the demo itself as pretty much "at cost".
If that was true (which it probably never was), the copper would be worth far more now: it was an investment to leave it lying in the ground.
But in practice, nothing like that is recoverable. 1 ton of cables does not equal 1 ton of copper, and in many places the costs and risks of pulling it out without damaging anything else are too high.
Fun Fact: Comcast and AT&T already sold vast tracts of copper, cutting internet off for thousands of towns. Those towns now have to rely solely on satellite broadband to connect, but the ISPs claim its "cable problems".
The cable has been melted down and sold in bulk to china for chip factories/the vast numbers of houses they built requiring copper wiring.
It isn't worth pulling out old landline wiring from houses. Too thin of wire and as you say only two pairs - or in some cases 1 1/2 pairs as older houses like mine had 3 wires because back in the day the idea of having two phones in one house was unthinkable - the 3rd wire was used in some way for party lines shared with another house.
I would suggest removing coax as a possibility, but realized that only satellite is likely to use real copper in the center conductor (because it needed to carry power) and even then people would shortcut that as it didn't matter on shorter runs so most of it will be copper coated steel.
The problem with removing any wire in your house is that it is almost always stapled down, and that's probably the least of your issues as it would make multiple bends, may be run through holes no larger than the cable is, etc. If you have to open up the walls, sure, or if it is wrapped on the outside of the house (since cable/satellite installers aren't running it through the basement/attic and fishing walls) but otherwise not worth the bother.
I suppose if you do a complete remodel of an older house you could replace copper piping with PEX. There may be reasons to do that for old enough copper pipes even beyond the desire to recycle it.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s an ATT spokesman said his biggest fear was that someone would realize how much copper they possessed, buy out the company in a hostile takeover so they could strip-mine the copper and not only bankrupt ATT, but leave the country with no comms infrastructure.
This was not an unrealistic fear in those Gordon Gecko days.
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