UNSUSTAINABLE: Our accelerating thirst for copper
Sharing our insights into the biggest sustainability challenges facing cities and industries. In this post, we explore our UNSUSTAINABLE dependence on copper to enable our electrified future. Our previous issues of the UNSUSTAINABLE series have explored cooling, windows, concrete & cement, steel, water scarcity, industrial heat, biodiversity data, urban adaptation and grid orchestration.
Copper has long been threaded through our cities, power systems, and machines, underwriting industrial progress for over a century. With a high strength to weight ratio, excellent thermal and electrical conductivity, and infinite useful lifetimes, copper is an indispensable industrial metal and ranks as the third most used metal globally. For most of the modern era, copper was treated as a stable and dependable industrial input, facing cyclical oversupply concerns. However, today, it is increasingly reclassified as a strategic resource, with structural scarcity.
Copper demand has nearly quadrupled in the last 50 years, driven by population growth, rising incomes, electrification, and industrialisation. These sources of demand continue to grow, while new sources are rapidly changing the pace. Copper has found itself at the center of two of the century’s defining transformations: the global energy transition and the rapid buildout of digital infrastructure related to datacenters and AI hardware. A single electric vehicle requires about 80 kg of copper, nearly four times that of an internal combustion engine car, while wind turbines use roughly 4–8 tonnes of copper per MW. Grid expansion alone is expected to account for more than 30 percent of incremental copper demand by 2050.
At the same time, the digital economy is accelerating copper consumption in less visible ways. Data centres, AI compute clusters, and high-voltage transmission all rely on copper-dense architectures. While a conventional data center uses between 5,000–15,000 tons of copper, a hyperscale data center can require up to 50,000 tons of copper per facility. With the pace of datacenter infrastructure growing, datacenters are on track to require more than half a million tons of copper by the end of the 2030.
With all this new demand, primary supply is severely and structurally constrained. Demand for the metal is expected to increase by up to 50% by 2040, which projects a production shortfall of up to 10 million tonnes per year.
Supply is facing structural constraint, firstly as existing copper mines are ageing, with ores having declined 70% in the last 40 years, making it harder (and costlier) to get ore out of the ground. In South America, a major source of the world’s copper, every 100 tonnes of ore yielded about 1.3 tonnes of copper two decades ago — now, this has fallen to 0.7 tonnes. More rock must be moved, more energy consumed, and more waste managed for every unit of metal produced.
Building new mines is not a near term solution. From discovery to production, a greenfield copper mine takes an average of 17 years to develop. In Arizona, the $10 billion Resolution copper project was discovered decades ago and is targeting 2030 for production: a 35-year timeline from discovery to first pour. New mining projects continue to face permitting delays, community opposition, seismic risks, labour disruptions, and growing environmental scrutiny.
Scrutiny with due cause for concern; building new mines is also, of course, an environmental catastrophe. Mining critical minerals is a huge driver of resource consumption, water use, GHG emissions, land use change, and pollution, all of which are exasperated by declining ore grades. Copper mining alone already accounts for 0.2% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and if demand is met primarily with mining, this is projected to grow over 150% to 2.7% by 2050. The production process also generates huge tailing piles and mining influenced wastewater (MIW), which is detrimental to the local ecosystem and human health.
With a fundamental shift in market dynamics being realized, the start of 2026 saw copper prices surge to record highs, rallying by more than 20% since the beginning of 2025, with prices now regularly exceeding $13,000 per tonne. At the corporate level, the same scarcity dynamic is driving consolidation, with a potential merger between Glencore and Rio Tinto poised to create the world’s largest copper company as the race to secure copper reshapes the sector.
Moreover, in a world of high geopolitical tensions, critical minerals have emerged as a frontline issue in safeguarding global energy and economic security. Investors can be seen pouring into metals this year at an unprecedented pace in search of reliable stores of wealth. With just 13 countries responsible for 85% of the world’s primary copper supply, the US has been aggressively stockpiling metal due to its lack of domestic ability to meet demand and the increasing volatility of the global trade system. Just see President Donald Trump’s “Project Vault”, a plan to stockpile $12 billion in critical minerals, chiefly to minimize reliance on Chinese rare earths and other metals.
Rethinking the problem
With every major trend driving global growth right now being copper intensive, from AI, renewable energy and electric vehicles, to grid modernization, meeting future demand requires rethinking supply.
- Mine tailings & Waste Water Valorisation
Across the world, more than 282 billion tonnes of mine tailings sit in storage facilities and tailing ponds, the legacy of decades of inefficient extraction. Historically treated as liabilities, these materials often contain significant residual copper and other valuable metals left behind by older processing methods. Legacy tailings are estimated to hold a potential value in the trillions of dollars across metals like copper, nickel, zinc, gold, and platinum group metals.
Advances in separation, chemistry, and materials science are transforming tailings into a new class of pre-extracted assets. Recovering copper from tailings not only creates supply without new mining, but also reduces environmental risk, rehabilitates land, and mitigates water contamination. While this hasn’t been done at scale before, companies like SiTration, a 2150 portfolio company, are pioneering new pathways for copper oxide ores. Sitration’s silicon-based membrane technology enables cost-effective extraction of metals from mine tailings and waste water, reframing waste streams as productive inputs rather than environmental burdens. Complementary approaches are emerging for sulfide ore oxides: Jetti Resources has developed a specialized catalyst to process sulfide ores, while Ceibo is developing an electrochemical process.
- Secondary Copper
Copper is 100% recyclable, and can be reused indefinitely with minimal loss of performance. However, about 20 % of all copper scrap generated worldwide never enters formal recycling channels (4.1–4.9 million metric tonnes). As such, increasing recycling infrastructure can materially reduce reliance on primary mining while cutting energy use and emissions. Scrap could account for 50% of the supply deficit expected by 2050. Platforms like 2150's Metycle are addressing this bottleneck by connecting fragmented scrap collectors directly with international recyclers. Similar circular economy models are emerging across the value chain: Agave Networks is building digital traceability using computer vision to validate the quality and composition of ferrous scrap metal, while Metaloop operates a B2B online scrap metal market place focused on pre-consumer waste. Together, these platforms shift scrap from an opaque, localized trade into a scalable global supply network, helping unlock secondary copper as a reliable pillar of future supply.
Closing the copper gap will not be solved by digging faster, but by thinking differently about where supply comes from. The most immediate and economically rational tonnes are already above ground, sitting in tailings, waste streams, and fragmented scrap markets that modern technology can unlock far faster than any new mine can be permitted or built. These pathways also do not compromise our environment — they work enable environmental remediation and circularity. Meeting future demand therefore depends less on expanding the footprint of extraction and more on upgrading the material efficiency of our supply chains.
About 2150
2150 is a venture capital firm investing in technology companies that are redefining cities and the industries that sustain them. Built on the belief that cities drive the majority of global prosperity and represent the greatest opportunity for sustainable progress, 2150 backs founders developing transformative solutions across energy, industrial decarbonisation, advanced manufacturing, mobility solutions, and urban systems. The firm partners with companies capable of delivering superior financial outcomes alongside measurable benefits for people and the planet. 2150 manages €500 million in assets under management and invests worldwide from its offices in London, Copenhagen and Berlin.
Find out more at www.2150.vc
