Recycling Old Copper Wires Could Be Worth Billions For Telcos (theregister.com) 93
Increasingly redundant copper wires may be worth over $7 billion to telecommunications firms, should they take the trouble to recycle them. From a report: 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 dozen telcos are investigating extracting copper wires from old networks to sell on the open market. The need for copper wiring is declining as carriers adopt fiber optics, which have superior carrying capacity -- one upcoming fiber technology is expected to increase the data capacity of undersea cables by 12 times.
While repurposing old stuff isn't unusual, recycling copper can be particularly valuable as the conductive metal is a crucial material for things like solar panels and batteries, which rely on old-school electrical wiring. A 2022 report from S&P Global estimated demand for copper would double by 2035 -- from 25 million metric tons in 2022 to 50 million -- and since the copper mining industry reportedly won't be able to keep up with demand, that means higher prices. Copper is already 50 percent more expensive since the COVID-19 pandemic, and prices will likely continue to increase.
While repurposing old stuff isn't unusual, recycling copper can be particularly valuable as the conductive metal is a crucial material for things like solar panels and batteries, which rely on old-school electrical wiring. A 2022 report from S&P Global estimated demand for copper would double by 2035 -- from 25 million metric tons in 2022 to 50 million -- and since the copper mining industry reportedly won't be able to keep up with demand, that means higher prices. Copper is already 50 percent more expensive since the COVID-19 pandemic, and prices will likely continue to increase.
I support this, but... (Score:5, Informative)
...copper must be replaced with fiber
Wireless is not an acceptable alternative
Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties). It can be made to work, with limitations, if necessary, but a pipe is always better
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...copper must be replaced with fiber
schoolboy error on their part, you need wires to make telephone calls! idiots!
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"A pipe is always better."
Always, you say? I see you have not met my old friend, American Telephone and Telegraph.
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Always, you say?
Yes. That's the unspoken subtext to this story: the most efficient way to get all those copper wires out and recycled will be to pay people in meth directly, cutting out the local drug dealer and scrap yard entirely.
Re:I support this, but... (Score:4, Informative)
They don't want to. Make them.
They can maybe charge double for a wireline connection at a construction cost 10-50 times higher. Of course if you flip that, you realize they are massively overcharging for cell service. But since they don't have to build the better option, they can charge whatever they want.
You can talk and talk about how much rural ground there is to cover in America vs. other major countries. But then what is the excuse for the cities not having good affordable wired Internet options?
Re: I support this, but... (Score:2)
You can talk and talk about how much rural ground there is to cover in America vs. other major countries. But then what is the excuse for the cities not having good affordable wired Internet options?
The cost of copper wiring?
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Wired options in urban areas?
Trenching, installing expensive equipment at each address, pulling permits months in advance for that trenching.
Repairs when those fibers/wires get torn up.
Upgrades.
Maintenance on the onsite equipment.
Easy.
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Large cities in other parts of the world manage it.
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So does the US but it's' not a great idea.
Most people are perfectly ok on wireless.
Or did you want your cell phone to require a wire to work, too?
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And don't forget some buildings where people live have rules controlled by a landlord or property development company that limit & dictate how utilities enter, exit, and traverse that building.
Just ask most apartment dwellers in NYC.
Re:I support this, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The construction cost of fiber is no more than the construction cost of copper. Not today. And unlike with copper, they need much less powered equipment at far fewer locations to maintain it. The only thing copper has going for it at a telco level is that it's already there: a sunk expense for both the wire and the equipment the wire connects to.
The problem with recycling it is twofold:
1. Someone has to climb the poles and take it down. Or dig it up where it's not on poles. Someone with the proper qualifications and licenses to be climbing poles that also carry high voltage electricity. In other words, the same expensive people they need to employ to put fiber up on the poles.
2. For every ton of copper recovered there are several tons of plastic, rubber and cloth to be disposed of. No one actually has an environmentally friendly answer to that. Mostly, it's: ship it to the third world where they burn it off the metal creating toxic everything.
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Telcos would never build a new nationwide network the way they did with copper without getting the same extreme level of government subsidy. It doesn't matter that fiber is no more expensive to install. Nothing is being installed new in most places. Just old stuff getting left to rot and customers being force swapped for cellular service instead of repairing.
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Yes, it would have been helpful if Clinton hadn't repurposed the universal service fund right when we were about to need it to redo the national telco infrastructure.
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And by "private contractors" you mean thieves.
Re: I support this, but... (Score:1)
Re: I support this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Recycling copper wire makes sense if the person doing the recycling has nothing else to do and isn't concerned about interrupting service, like a vandal.
What is the hourly cost of a British telco employee? How many workers are need on a recycling team? How much copper can a team pull in an hour? What is the cost/effort required to transport, store, deliver the removed wiring to a recycling plant?
It's one thing to think you can just yank the wires, throw them in the back of your truck, and wander by the recycler on your way home from work, but the effort would likely involve a great deal of effort, almost mirroring the original deployment of the cable.
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You think all those guys are busy 40 hours a week?
They can get paid to stand around or get paid to pull copper over the next 10 years.
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You think all those guys are busy 40 hours a week?
Yes, because they are. Under provisioning manpower is the norm in the telco world precisely so people aren't standing around doing nothing. Ever wonder why getting a new line installed takes 8-12 weeks? It's because of the work backlog.
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It takes 8-12 weeks because they need to pull permits to dig up the street.
For installs where no digging is required, I usually get an install in 48-72 hours.
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It takes 8-12 weeks because they need to pull permits to dig up the street.
No it doesn't. Especially in the UK where infrastructure companies have right of way for their services.
For installs where no digging is required, I usually get an install in 48-72 hours.
And they are also overprovisioned, just with a faster turnaround. The difference being someone coming to your house does multiple jobs a day, someone doing a dig takes several days.
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Oh my bad, I didn't know the UK is that broken.
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Don't forget that a lot of the major copper lines aren't on poles but underground - and that could be quite expensive to unearth.
However let the environmentalists pull that string that unused copper lines shouldn't be left underground since that could be unhealthy.
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When I got fiber installed, Verizon helpfully ripped out all the copper to the DMARC. Thus disabling the alarm system. It was a new house, and I didn't event know it existed yet. I don't really care for alarm systems anyway, but now I suppose if I wanted to re-activate it, I'd have to go through a huge rigamarole. I don't imagine the phone company is eager to install new residential copper anywhere.
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Normally the alarm company gets an alert if their system goes offline and stops reporting in for any reason. Higher quality systems use cell as a backup connection.
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Modern alarm systems goes over the mobile phone network and/or internet.
At work we have one module that does both for redundancy. I think it has to be upgraded to support 4G/5G now that 2G/3G is going to be shut down.
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Should they take the trouble (Score:2)
Why would telcos not recycle it? Is this meant to imply that they'd just leave it in the ground or on utility poles, even though they have no further use for it? I suppose there's a copper price below which it wouldn't be worth the cost of salvage, but that's certainly not the case today, and unlikely to be true in the future. (If they do leave it behind, I wish them luck: the meth heads will get it eventually.)
Or is the summary implying that the telcos wo
Re:Should they take the trouble (Score:5, Informative)
Why would telcos not recycle it?
like you said, sometimes you cant just open a manhole and pull out half a mile of copper, you probably have to dig up the ground multiple times - each time ultimately costing you money. for the rural connections it might not be worth the effort even with the currently high price
Re:Should they take the trouble (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. $7 billion in copper isn't worth much if it takes you $20 billion to extract it all.
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Not necessarily. I recall a study a few years back saying most petty thieves (i.e. not part of an organised crime gang) made the equivalent of less than minimum wage. Anyone legitimately removing old cabling will be paid at least minimum wage, probably more (it's a skilled job driving plant or climbing poles), plus all the overheads (HR, payroll, training, benefits and taxes..) .
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Thieves stealing copper lines goes for the easy accessible copper, not the copper that's buried 2 ft below ground for 10 miles or more crossing 25 properties on the way.
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20 Billion is greater than 7 Billion in every proper maths book I have ever read. And you certainly don't need a First or a Second in Maths to know that.
So how do you arrive at "It must be cost effective in some cases" ?
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20 Billion is greater than 7 Billion in every proper maths book I have ever read. And you certainly don't need a First or a Second in Maths to know that.
So how do you arrive at "It must be cost effective in some cases" ?
Not all copper is going to be equally as expensive to recover. Too much math and not enough common sense.
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20 Billion is greater than 7 Billion in every proper maths book I have ever read. And you certainly don't need a First or a Second in Maths to know that.
So how do you arrive at "It must be cost effective in some cases" ?
Not all copper is going to be equally as expensive to recover. Too much math and not enough common sense.
Beancounters follow the math since they lack common sense. That's how big businesses operate. Just sayin'
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I'm just commenting on the math; know nothing about the costs of pulling copper, but the way it can be cost effective in some cases is:
the 7/20 billion is given in the aggregate. It's entirely possible that of the $7b value of the copper, the first $1b is in very accessible places and only takes $100m to extract. The next $2b of copper is slightly less accessible and takes $1b to extract. then the remaining $4b is in inaccessible locations and takes $18.9b to extract.
This type of distribution (curve shap
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Exactly. $7 billion in copper isn't worth much if it takes you $20 billion to extract it all.
Also $7 billion in copper might be $7.5 billion in copper next year. You'd have made more money by waiting.
Looking at the price of copper [google.com]
$7 billion a year ago would be about 27% higher and worth about $8.8 billion today.
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Exactly. $7 billion in copper isn't worth much if it takes you $20 billion to extract it all.
THIS is why the economy is fucked up. You don't know how to solve simple problems.
We already have people who are willing to risk death to get at that copper. Merely tell them which copper they can "steal" with one caveat, they must return 10% of the value of the copper they sell if they wish to get further notices about copper to be recycled.
Problem solved without any costs and possibly a slight profit.
But nooo.... it is better to leave that mess laying around because nobody wants to pay to remove it. It bo
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The rural connections aren't in manholes, they're on poles.
Lots of the urban connections are in the air too.
For the underground wires, they'll probably use them to pull new fiber through the conduits. Conduit space is valuable, can't just leave dead copper sitting in there.
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The rural connections aren't in manholes, they're on poles.
theres also very little copper above ground
For the underground wires, they'll probably use them to pull new fiber through the conduits
i dont think they can just pull the wires out most of the time - theyve jammed that many connections into the pipe that its all wedged in there, leading them to just dig the road up and pull the entire conduit itself out....
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My nephew climbs high power utility poles for a living. I assure you he has plenty of extra time to take down some copper if he's up there doing other things already. Even if that was the only copper they pulled it would be worth it.
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theres something like 100 to 1000 times more cables running underground than what you can fit on poles
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Most of which isn't worth a special effort which is why they say over the next 10 years.
They'll pull the copper while doing other work.
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Apparently quoting the article is now trolling.
Mod this down, too.
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The rural connections aren't in manholes, they're on poles.
That's just the branch lines. The main lines are buried and they are often as thick as your underarm, good luck with poles for them.
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No the summary is implying they leave it in place to rot unused. Which is exactly what they actually do.
Re: Should they take the trouble (Score:2)
I once had a part-time job pulling mainframe buss and tag wiring out of a raised floor datacenter that was being de-commissioned. In datacenters the tradition was (and still may be) that you abandon wiring in-place, lest you cause expensive/serious problems with production systems.
I find it hard to believe that it is economically feasible to pay someone a union wage to dig up copper wiring, recycle it, AND turn a profit.
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I agree. The only time we've ever remediated old cabling from a substation was when we had to fix a shitton of cables due to oil impregnating the insulation and physically ran out of space to pull the cable into the substation. Suddenly the equation involved potentially building a new substation and *then* it was cheaper to go in and pull the old cable. Recycling those several tonnes of copper did not work out financially without a very large additional incentive.
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This was still quite common as of 2010 when I was last in a raised-floor datacenter. They had an anthropological study under that floor if someone wanted it - layers of various cable moving through time including RS-232, coax, twinax, token ring baluns, single-mode fiber, cat5, cat6, multimode fiber, etc.
Nobody wanted to touch any of it out of fear.
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Well paid workers means diminishing returns. If the workers were already there working on the new fiber, it would be worth it for little extra time.
Near me, there was a theft of 800 feet of telco cable. The thick ones with maybe 25 pairs. The telco claimed "hundreds" of dollars in damages. Meaning - they probably weren't even in use except one or two pairs. The person was caught and will probably get charged with a felony for "damage to critical infrastructure."
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If so, it won't just be for the amount of real damage done. It will also be to discourage others from stealing copper wiring.
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Well paid workers means diminishing returns. If the workers were already there working on the new fiber, it would be worth it for little extra time.
Near me, there was a theft of 800 feet of telco cable. The thick ones with maybe 25 pairs. The telco claimed "hundreds" of dollars in damages. Meaning - they probably weren't even in use except one or two pairs. The person was caught and will probably get charged with a felony for "damage to critical infrastructure."
If you ignore the cost of trenching to reinstall it, it really is only hundreds of dollars in damage. That stuff is under a dollar a foot even in retail quantities. It also isn't worth much. There's about a pound of copper every 10 feet or so, so 800 feet would be 80 pounds of copper. The person who stole it might have gotten $160 or so for it.
But that also means that it isn't ever worth digging up unless you are compelled to do so by law. Even without markup from contracting the work out, trenching wi
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Why would telcos not recycle it?
Because in Europe and Japan, DSL is still very much actively used in the cities, with faster speeds that were available in the US. Copper is capable of much greater speeds than American ISP's used, and Europe's more densely populated areas makes the economics of the DSL backend equipment more feasible than in suburban, spread-out America. IIRC, DSL was still the most popular broadband option in Germany.
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Not sure about the rest of Europe, but the UK is shutting down ADSL and POTS service, and moving to VDSL where fibre to the premises isn't available. Yes, there's still a copper line, but it runs from the cabinet to the premises - the copper lines between the exchange and cabinet become redundant.
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Why would telcos not recycle it?
If that cable has any lead wrapping or lead casing on it, then extraction & recycling have to be done with appropriate care. There might even be legal regulations to follow.
Yes, lead was used in US Telco cables for many years and in some places it holds up far better and far longer than plastic coated cable. Lead wrap cable does not degrade in the hot desert sun whereas plastic coated cable can degrade (look at the plastic interior of your car). Lead splice cases can be 100% sealed shut and sunk into wa
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If that cable has any lead wrapping or lead casing on it, then extraction & recycling have to be done with appropriate care. There might even be legal regulations to follow.
Also do asbestos too.
change the same price for capped 5G without real i (Score:2)
change the same price for capped 5G without real ipv4 also saves them an lot vs replacing that copper with fiber.
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It's not possible to give everyone routable ipv4, sooner or later everyone is going to be stuck behind multiple layers of NAT unless you pay a _LOT_ more.
In some countries it's already the reality, and in others you only get routable ipv4 from legacy carriers that were around long enough ago to have large allocations and aren't growing in terms of user numbers.
Here it's a choice between the incumbent telco service over copper (adsl) with routable ipv4, or a new fibre provider with cgnat. The fibre provider
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This story originates from the UK, despite the misspelling of "fibre". The UK is committed to rolling out gigabit internet to 85% of premises by 2025 and 100% by 2030. There's billions of taxpayer's £ to fund connections to hard to reach areas. I think that goes beyond what most people see with 5G, even if it can theoretically reach those speeds and more.
https://publications.parliamen... [parliament.uk]
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/pr... [www.gov.uk]
Companies like OpenReach are busy replacing copper connections with fibre
hobbos know (Score:1)
for example: Los Angeles 6th street bridge (Score:2)
Los Angeles' 6th street bridge has been in countless Hollywood movies and television shows. Recently it was completely rebuilt because the previous implementation had 'concrete cancer' and ongoing maintenance wasn't realistic.
The new version had gorgeous LED colored lighting [archive.today], and was totally Instagrammable. However now much of it is dark, due to copper thieves.
Re: Just thinking here (Score:2, Offtopic)
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You smoke too much pole.
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I can only think of one reason why Trump would choose to dig Russia out of the Vietnam they have dug for themselves, and that would point to Trump being _way_ more corrupt than Biden, so you may need to rethink your approach to persuading people here.
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The lesser of two evils. Trump is less corrupt than Biden. The Dems are war mongers. We need Trump to stop the wars.
The Dumbassery is strong in this one!
Trump is corrupt on the basis of evidence that stood up to scrutiny in several court cases. Biden is corrupt on the basis that Republicans say so. (The impeachment travesty is now down to "the evidence is pouring in faster than we can process it".)
Yes, the only good thing you an say about the Trump presidency is that he didn't start any wars, and that he got the ball rolling on getting us out of Afghanistan. But our last two wars - one utterly inexcusable - were start
Re: Just thinking here (Score:2)
subcontractors (Score:2)
They already have subcontractors doing it; they are known as "The Unhoused."
Now if only they did it a decade ago (Score:2)
Re: Now if only they did it a decade ago (Score:2)
We did that like 10 years ago (Score:2)
But then again it's easy to redo your whole infrastructure when you're a narrow rectangle where most people live by the sea. It's a whole 300 km backbone lol
Old school? (Score:3)
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Why is electrical wiring "old school"? It's perfectly modern and high tech, as there's no better alternative to transmit power.
That depends on your definition of "electrical wiring". If the only purpose is to transmit electrical power, then you are correct. But in common usage, "electrical wiring" also includes wires that transmit communication signals of various speeds and frequencies. In that case, fibre optic cables are far superior for several reasons, not the least of which is higher data speed.
Also, a lot of non-tech-savvy people call anything that vaguely resembles a garden hose and delivers power or data "electrical wiring"
There's a catch though (Score:2)
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The landfill. It's already in the ground, getting it all in one place would be a net benefit.
If there is a lead sheath around the copper bundle, that can be recycled too.
i like to recycle old copper wires (Score:2)
Solar and copper? (Score:2)
" recycling copper can be particularly valuable as the conductive metal is a crucial material for things like solar panels"
Solar panels use barely, if any, copper. Most times, it's all HASL-finished aluminum tabs in the junction box, and tin-plated aluminum wiring for the junction bars and bus ribbons. The only thing using copper would be the M4 cables. Even those connectors are aluminum at the ends most times.
Source: I manufactured solar panels at SunSpark Technologies.
surprised criminals haven't stolen it (Score:1)
Pff, that's nothing. (Score:2)
Come to Australia, and you can buy a government that'll give you 11 billion [itnews.com.au] for all your crappy old copper wire and let you watch them try to build a modern internet infrastructure on it! Fun and laughs for the whole boardroom!