Actions of the Copper Industry Toward a Future Carbon-Neutral Society

The copper industry is striving to achieve sustainable developments while providing copper as an essential raw material for today’s electrical/electronic society. Copper resources are limited, and copper production requires a large amount of energy, especially for ore processing. Meanwhile, the major end-product manufacturers are required to limit their carbon footprint of copper material, especially by using recycled copper. Whether recycled copper alloys have undergone a life cycle assessment (LCA) at the time of manufacture is doubtful. Furthermore, no metal material can be recycled without a primary metal. If the required amount of copper alloy can be covered by recycled copper, an LCA evaluation of the recycling process will be sufficient, but this situation seems unreasonable given the recent growth in copper consumption. Therefore, in this presentation, I propose an integrated LCA evaluation that includes copper ore extraction, smelting, and recycling processes.