Downstream: End-of-life and recycling performance

Copper's recycling system is, by most measures, mature. Copper retains both its value and its physical properties through repeated recycling, making recovery economically attractive in a way that is not true of every material considered in this study.⁶⁶ The figure below shows that collection rates are already comparatively high (at almost 56%) by the early 2020s and improve only gradually thereafter (reaching just over 60% by 2050), suggesting a system operating close to its practical ceiling rather than one with substantial untapped potential for further collection. Future growth in recycled volumes is therefore more likely to come from improving what happens to material after it is collected than from collecting a significantly larger share of end-of-life copper.

This maturity is also reflected in the changing balance of end-of-life flows. From the early 2020s onwards, recycled copper surpasses uncollected and disposed copper, with the gap widening steadily to 2050. By the end of the projection period, recycled copper exceeds eight million tonnes, compared with around seven million tonnes that remain uncollected or disposed of. This marks a structural shift in which recycling becomes the dominant end-of-life pathway rather than simply an expanding one. However, dominant does not mean sufficient. Even as recycling becomes the largest end-of-life pathway, a substantial volume of copper is still lost throughout the projection period, whether through non-collection, disposal, or losses after collection. This first indicator does not distinguish between material that is never collected and material that is actively disposed of, so it is not possible to say with certainty whether collection or disposal is the bigger driver.

What is clear is that copper's main downstream challenge lies before recycling even begins, rather than within the recycling process itself. Consumer electronics illustrate why this challenge persists even in a mature recycling system. Individual devices contain relatively small quantities of copper, are often short-lived, and lack the dedicated, economically attractive collection infrastructure that has developed around larger industrial and construction-related copper streams, where higher volumes and per-unit values have historically justified investment in recovery.⁶⁷

The following figure shows that old scrap and new scrap have remained nearly balanced for most of copper's history. A clearer shift towards old-scrap dominance emerges from the mid-2020s, as the large in-use stocks discussed above begin to reach end-of-life at a meaningful scale. By 2050, old scrap is close to twice the volume of new scrap, at approximately eight million tonnes compared with just over four million tonnes. This shift is not primarily the result of changes in recycling policy, but of the same structural lag identified in the midstream analysis. The old scrap recovered today reflects copper demand from decades ago, when in-use stocks were considerably smaller and concentrated in different applications. By contrast, manufacturing scrap (new scrap) has long been relatively straightforward to recover because it is generated in large volumes at industrial scale and at a single point in the supply chain.

The End-of-Life Recycling Rate, at approximately 44% in the baseline year, increases only modestly, reaching almost 48% by 2050, consistent with collection rates that are already approaching their practical limit. The Recycling Input Rate, by contrast, rises from around 31% in 2020 to 54% by 2050. This increase reflects both the growing contribution of secondary material to refined input and the declining contribution of primary supply as it fails to keep pace with demand.

The picture that emerges is a system with a relatively mature end-of-life system, where the main constraint lies in collection rather than recyclability. As larger volumes of copper reach end of life, secondary supply increasingly compensates for the declining availability of primary supply.