Copper may be an ageing technology for delivering broadband, but for telcos now recycling all those kilometres of cables it could be worth billions.
Some are already recognising that fact of course. British engineering company TXO says they’re talking to a dozen telcos about extracting copper wires from old networks to sell on the open market, estimating there’s up to 800,000 metric tons of copper wiring available for harvesting in the UK alone.
And that’s worth more than $7B at today’s prices. An enormous commercial opportunity.
As carriers increasingly turn to optic fibre to deliver faster commercial and domestic data than copper can—including Australia’s NBN—they’re left with a hell of a lot of copper in the ground. Copper that is now at a premium for use in new technologies like data centres for AI, wind turbines, energy storage and electric cars.
It’s not just the UK either. Global telco AT&T is ranking up its recycling efforts. The company is currently working with 4 copper reclamation centres in the US and plans to add more, saying they recycled more than 14,000 tons of copper in the last 2 years.
In Australia Telstra has started a ‘Cable Recovery Program’ for the removal of underground cables. But the NBN is also sitting on vast amounts of it, including almost 50,000kms of copper cabling it bought in 2022 despite criticism it would soon be outdated.
Recycling copper could now be a financial godsend. While it’s quite a complex process to get the copper up, prices between $6,000 to $9,000 per ton means profit can top 30% after extraction, recovery and processing costs. Not bad odds if you ask me.
Our roads may have once been paved in copper but in today’s scarce market that now looks more like gold.
Cheer, John Fennell.