Abstract
The life cycle analogy originates from biology. The life of an individual (higher) animal begins with conception — the fertilization of the egg — and proceeds through a series of stages including growth of the foetus in the womb, birth, infancy, adolescence, maturity, senescence and death. For most purposes the briefer characterization ‘from cradle to grave’ suffices (in biology), although in the present study we allow also for reincarnation (recycling). In the case of a metal such as copper one automatically thinks of the ‘cradle’ as the mine and the ‘grave’ as the ultimate disposal site, whether in a landfill or a sediment. Recycling is analogous to reincarnation, in the sense that it is the beginning of a second life.
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Examples might include public fears of radiation poisoning (due to Three-Mile Island and Chemobyl), dioxin (Times Beach, Seveso), and asteroid collisions (Hollywood). Every risk analyst knows that tobacco and drunken driving are hundreds or thousands of times riskier than any of the three examples. Yet people smoke and drink.
This has been done and published in the case of nickel processes (Anne Landfield, Ecobalance/Price Waterhouse Coopers, personal communication, August, 2001 ).
A small admixture of arsenic makes copper harder. Pure copper is too soft and malleable for cutting tools or other implements, but the alloy with arsenic is much harder. The so-called ‘iceman’ (c. 3300 BC), whose frozen corpse was uncovered in the Austrian Alps a few years ago, carried a copper arsenic axe and had traces of both copper and arsenic in his hair (Landner and Lindeström 1999 ).
No such composite ores are mentioned in recent surveys of the mineral industries, such as (Kesler 1994).
Another use that has been important at some times and places is for casting statues, particularly of Buddha. The large copper Buddha at Kamakura in Japan (cover photo) may be the biggest single copper casting in the world.
The river (which gave its name to the Rio Tinto Zinc Co. (RlZ), now Rio Tinto Ltd, was colored by mine wastes.
From the 1890s through the 1920s New York City and the Hudson-Raritan basin was the world’s1eading center of copper refining, due in large part to the nearby location of copper and brass consuming industries, especially the burgeoning electrical goods manufacturing sector (Ayres et at. 1988).
The foregoing figures, from standard USGS publications are widely quoted. However a recent publication gives much lower estimates for the crustal abundance of copper and zinc, namely 25 ppm for copper and 63 ppm for zinc (Wedepohl 1995 ).
Apparently the bimodal distribution is still regarded by most geologists as speculation. It is true that there is no direct evidence of bimodality. However, this is not a serious objection, inasmuch as there is equally no direct evidence for the McKelvey hypothesis of single modality. On the other hand, if copper, lead and zinc were distributed according to the McKelvey rule, the total quantities in the earth’s crust would have to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than the accepted crustal abundance.
It is not yet clear how the undersea manganese nodules fit into the overall geological picture. They do contain copper (0.53 percent on average) but both the availability and recoverability of the nodules are highly uncertain. It is now known that much of the oceanographic ‘research’ on the subject that was done in the 1970s was financed by the US Navy to disguise its real interest in trying to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. We know little about activity in this field at present.
Known recoverable reserves as of the early 1980s were estimated by another source as 544 million metric tons (DKI 1984).
It was estimated in 1975 by the Committee on Natural Resources and the Environment of the US National Academy of Sciences (COMRATE) that the mineralogical barrier for copper occurs at 0.1 percent grade. Below that grade, copper would be found only as atomic substitutes in other rocks. The committee also calculated that the maximum amount of copper embodied in all ores would be 1000 MMT (COMRATE 1975 ).
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Ayres, R.U., Ayres, L.W., Råde, I. (2003). Introduction. In: The Life Cycle of Copper, Its Co-Products and Byproducts. Eco-Efficiency in Industry and Science, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3379-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3379-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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