There's a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.

Seriously though, there'll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.

What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.

I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)

But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I'm literally typing on the older phone now.

I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.

Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.

I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.

But if we don't start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we're going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.

Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.

Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.

Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It's technically "consumption" to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you're talking about doesn't factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That's about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren't going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

If you're going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that's morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we're talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

Well, I suspect we've got enough copper for the next 50 years, so... good timing.

And, you don't start with a Manhattan sized rock, you practice with little ones just big enough to survive re-entry and work your way up. The key is learning to operate long term with "rock moving tech" in solar orbit. We're not there, which is why we should have started 50 years ago...

We have enough copper for a lot more than that, depending on how far and deep we want to go

This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.