Arizona mining industry steps up to meet skyrocketing demand for copper
by Erin Thorburn | AZ Big Media
It has the highest recycling rate of any engineering metal, every child born today will use about 1,500 pounds of it, between 500 and 600 pounds of it were used to make billions of doorknobs in the United States, and the Statue of Liberty is plated with upwards of 179,000 pounds of it.
“It” is copper.
From consumer goods to crafting American icons to operating power plants and sustaining green energy, the demand for copper is growing at greater rates than ever.
Recent reports demonstrate that the global need for copper is anticipated to rise by as much as 50 percent over the next two decades. And, guess which corner of the world holds 27.1 percent of the global market size in copper? The United States. Zooming in closer, you’ll see that Arizona accounts for 75 percent of the copper mined in the U.S.
So, the million-dollar question — or perhaps, more appropriately, the 28-million-tonnes question (28 million tonnes is the annual amount of copper in demand) is — will Arizona rise to meet the growing demand for copper?
