It’s ok just 3D print it :)
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:
Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.
This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.
That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism's need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered "demand creation" (through advertising) and now even "growth hacking" to supercharge this process. It has made us more wasteful than ever. We are headed into a wall.
This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.
Artificial demand creation isn't necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.
And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that's a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.
This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don't need and dont have the time nor energy to use.
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Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.
I don't disagree, but I don't see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.
There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn't really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.
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We do have enough copper
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Copper can be replaced with other materials in many applications
While we should always be careful about how we expend natural resources, we should not fall into sensationalism.
Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
Ea-Nasir treats his customers and the world with contempt.
In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)
Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.
We just need to use it in smart ways
We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying
Didn't China just punt off a ticket to some asteroids? Viability tests maybe?
Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.
Its possible to just coat the surface if that's the effect needed. I was so happy a year ago that I had found copper Ethernet wire. However upon inspection recently the wire is basically aluminum coated in copper. Usually, platers will first clean the surface and then electro less coat nickel on aluminum. Then you can coat other things like copper. Aluminum forms an oxide almost instantly in normal atmosphere so its difficult to coat with anything. But electroless nickel works very well after an HCl bath or a nitric bath.
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this website is cancer. I'm I'm mobile and counted 6 ads in my view with space left for 3 lines of text. Don't post crap like this. Yes, i normally use an ad blocker but this is inside the connect app
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it could be theess of a website but i saw no link to a peer reviewed publication, so i think its safe to assume were good with he cooper
Well couldn't we, like, share it? The average joe in america is consuming 100 times more than an indian
But that would be unfair to the average Joe! And think about the billionaires; how would they survive if everything was shared? /s
How much old copper piping is still out there that could be replaced by other materials to recover the copper? I'm sure there are other common obsolete applications. The nice thing about metals is that we already have a pretty robust recycling chain in place for them. That plus the remaining supply plus aluminium plus other replacements plus careful design to minimize the use of copper where it's absolutely necessary might be enough to carry us through.
"General, we need to consult all of the local meth addicts, stat."
The poor will have scavenged the abandoned buildings in built-up areas, yes. Still-occupied buildings and those in smaller towns with no easy access to a scrapyard are more likely to be intact. So it's more likely to be a case of "these are no longer to code, they are not grandfathered, you have a two-year grace period to switch them out" (staggered geographically or by building classification to avoid a run on plastic pipes) plus "road trip!"
We might also end up mining older dumps for stuff discarded when copper was cheaper.
Aluminum is a substitute for copper in any straight wiring application. PEX for domestic piping.
There's also the idea of crashing a metallic asteroid somewhere convenient, like the Outback.
If you have the tech to do that, just capture the asteroid in orbit and mine it in space.
I'm envisioning extracting more copper and other metals that would be utilized in space, so - yeah, if you can develop smelting and refinement capabilities on-orbit there's some attractiveness there, but down on the mud-ball we're going to use over a million times as much material as we are currently utilizing on orbit and beyond, so getting that material down is going to be a whole lot cheaper and more efficient as a "natural skyfall" than any kind of controlled re-entry.
Yeah, that ain't happening for the next 50 years. The amount of logistics and technology required for that is beyond immense, never mind risks
Oh, and you say risks, I say: military application potential.
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Good think we can use aluminum and copper then...
There could be two ways to address this problem. One is asteroid mining, which has the potential to be extremely lucrative because there are lots of asteroids with huge metal deposits.
Another is discovering new conductors. There's been progress in developing conductive plastics. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-scientists-material-plastic-metal.html
Abolish copper coins. Job done :-)
Largely done already, as I understand it. Most use zinc now.
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