COPPER CABLING
xxxxxxx Redundant Copper
Recycling
Urban Mining
By: Kennedy Miller, Technology and Sustainability Manager, Brand-Rex
Introduction
Kennedy Miller reports
that urban mining can
breath new life into
old copper cable.
It typically takes a whole tonne of ore
to produce just one kilo of pure virgin
copper. That’s a tonne of material
that has to be dug out of the ground,
processed and purified. The rest is
999kg of waste! More economical than
fibre, resources are dwindling fast in the
face of a recent surge in copper mining.
Copper is in high demand for cabling
used in data centres and buildings to
serve the explosion in big data, 24/7
online banking, cloud services, gaming,
HDTV, media streaming and next
generation Wi-Fi. The copper mining
industry that’s needed to support this
voracious and ever-growing demand
is equally massive – especially in Chile
where 34 per cent of the world’s copper
is mined, and in Turkey where much
of it is purified. But given that the earth
only has a limited amount to give up,
the strain being placed on this finite
resource is fast becoming unsustainable.
With virtually all the ‘easy wins’ in
mining terms now taken and exhausted,
the concentrations of copper in the
mines that are left are now lower. The
mining processes needed to extract it
are therefore becoming more difficult
and costly. The environmental risks
from any poorly managed or restored
mines are also huge. So, in the face of
such relentless demand and increasing
scarcity, how can the world continue to
feed the hunger for more copper?
Untapped Source
One intriguing but largely invisible
answer could lie within the millions
of buildings all around the world
(data centres, office blocks, factories,
hospitals and other commercial and
public buildings) where old electrical,
telephone and data cables are ‘buried’
under floors and in ceiling voids. With
many installations dating back to the
1970s and the emergence of Ethernet
technology, installers over the years have
generally taken the easy option of laying
new cabling systems over the top of old
ones without bothering to remove and
recover those that are no longer needed.
This means that there are literally
millions of tonnes of copper lying
unused in cable-ways in every part
of the world. Not only are they lying
unused, but often clogging up data
centre cooling systems and adversely
impacting efficiency. With perhaps as
much as a tonne of redundant copper
in larger buildings - adding together all
the old coax, power and telecom cables
they might be hiding - this represents a
massive and highly valuable untapped
source that could be far easier to
remove, recover and recycle than tearing
huge volumes of rock out of the ground.
Recycled copper also has a 40 per cent
lower carbon factor than virgin material.
Pioneering Initiative
As a major copper cable manufacturer,
Brand-Rex is taking the lead in a
pioneering initiative to make the urban
mining of copper a reality. Now in its
5th year of being completely carbon
neutral in its worldwide operations, and
even with some carbon neutral products
including so called Cat5 and Cat6 IT
networking cables, the company is now
proving that urban mining is not just
a nice idea, but a practical reality that
can make perfect commercial sense
alongside all its obvious environmental
adva ntages. The initiative was put to the
test when Essent, part of the German
RWE Group, decided to consolidate
its data centre operations. With its HQ
in the city of Hertogenbosch in the
southern Netherlands, Essent is the
largest energy company in the country
with a supply record dating back over
150 years and an ambition to supply all
of its energy in a CO2-neutral way by
2050.
With Essent’s decision to consolidate
its data centre operations into the RWE
data centre in Germany came the need
to decommission two existing facilities in
Landgraaf and Tilburg. This meant that
a large amount of now obsolete cabling,
servers, racks, power distribution
units and cable management had to
be removed. The company set out
to recover and recycle as much as
possible of this material. It called on
the expertise of Brand-Rex who took
the lead in an ambitious project to
dispose of the existing infrastructure
in a sustainable way – building on past
successful experience with the recycling
of cabling at other customers’ sites.
Positive Revenue Stream
The strain being placed on copper mining is fast becoming unsustainable
46 NETCOMMS europe Volume V Issue 6 2015
Managed by staff from Brand-Rex,
Essent employees retrieved and
collected the redundant products and
put them into specific container units
www.netcommseurope.com