3.1.3. Copper Recycling

When large amounts of scrap become the main raw material for copper production, primary copper smelters cannot be utilized due to technical limitations. This limitation necessitates the use of a furnace for recycling, which can process scrap materials [17]. To highlight the flow of recycled copper, this sector is newly added to the extended I-O table. The output structure of this sector is identical to primary copper smelting.

End-of-life products are collected and sorted into individual grades and provided to suitable sectors for modern day copper recycling. This means that copper scrap collected from end-users is not always recycled as copper and could be used for wire or brass production. This type of recycling, often called cascading may cause quality issues due to impurities. To prevent downgrading, the recycled copper sector and copper collection sectors are independent of each other, which means that collected copper scrap considered in this study is processed only to high-quality copper. Table 1 highlights the sectors and options considered in the extended I-O table.


