Scrap copper

Copper scraps.

Scrap copper is copper suitable for recycling. Like aluminium, copper is recyclable without any loss of quality, both from raw state and from manufactured products. In volume, copper is the third most recycled metal after iron and aluminum. An estimated 80% of all copper ever mined is still in use today.

The process of recycling copper is roughly the same as is used to extract copper but requires fewer steps. High-purity scrap copper is melted in a furnace and then reduced and cast into billets and ingots, while lower-purity scrap is refined by electroplating in a bath of sulfuric acid.

Dependencies

• Copper
  • Copper wire
  • Scrap copper

See also

• Scrap
• Scrap aluminum
• Scrap iron
• Scrap paper
• Scrap steel
• Scrap thermoplastics
• Recycled materials

References

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Copper#Recycling, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).