Is recycling the new garbage?

• Author: Morris, Jane Anne
• Position: Homo Metallicus:

The history of Homo metallicus mirrors more than technological prowess: consequences may be closer than they appear. And, they are coming from our blind spot.

Before humans started hammering portable copper mirrors about five thousand years ago, the only mirrors were pools of clear still water, reflecting trees and sky. A thousand years after those first handheld reflectors, people began making them of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Production of copper and its alloys fouled the clear pools, consumed the trees, and sullied the sky. Today, the view from the slag heap takes in not only the mine but the town dump.

Meanwhile, the concept of recycling has ac quired an aura more saintly than the practice of re cycling warrants. In my own small way, I once contributed to recycling mythology. So here, taking copper as my starting point, I unpack the assumptions that can lead from a justifiable horror at metal mining practices, to an all-too-uncritical embrace of recycling.

Copper through the ages

Native Americans in Wisconsin made points and knives of hammered copper.

The Mesopotamians ushered in the Age of Bronze by making of it a statue of a bull. Harder than copper, bronze holds an edge better and is more resistant to corrosion. In the earliest fortified towns it was used for shields and helmets, and battle axes, for attacking both humans and trees. Chisels, awls, pendants, sickles, bracelets, swords, 4000-year-old Chinese coins shaped like tools--all of bronze. Bronze tweezers to clean wounds made by bronze dagger blades.

By 3000 years ago copper, bronze, and iron were in widespread use in the middle and near east, for knives, razors, hammers, axes, always axes. The Assyrians wore armor of leather and bronze; the Greeks and Romans used bronze and steel. In the Middle Ages, as advances in weaponry relegated chain mail to the status of underwear, metal-plated armor evolved. Bronze was hammered into huge cathedral doors, and cast into bells that rang out alarms and devotions.

Copper alloyed with zinc produced brass, long used for locks, doorknockers, and chandeliers. Bronze cannons powered by the gunpowder that became widespread in the 16th century launched brass artillery shells. Ships of war were bottomed in copper against corrosion, then clad in iron against artillery attack.

Somebody discovered that if you pour molten lead through a sieve off a tower into a tub of water, the droplets form spheres. Hardened with antimony, these spheres become musket shot. About 1850, copper and brass shot cartridges replaced paper ones.

Coopers shaped copper into barrel hoops. Bronze was used in bearings, gears, ship screws and propellers. Upholsterers tapped brass tacks and turned sundry alloys into an array of kettles, dishes and trays. Tinkers kept them in repair.

But our copper habit was then in its infancy.

The late nineteenth century development of electricity stimulated demand for copper and other metals as the telegraph, telephone, light bulb, and other appliances went from curiosities to necessities. Fine copper wire was wound aura more around armatures for motors and turbine generators at hydroelectric plants, and soon, steam-fired ones. It twisted around the inside of new gadgets and appliances. Outside of them, copper wire and lead-sheathed cables were strung behind walls, between buildings, along streets, across continents, under oceans.

A fledgling automobile industry blossomed, consuming 15-50 pounds of copper per vehicle, plus a full metal complement of its sister elements. (1) The US alone has produced well over 700 million cars and trucks. (2) The infamous 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast could have been heard on only a few tens of thousands of radios in the world, perhaps half of them in the US. Each contained its cache of coiled copper. (3)

Copper usage surged to feed the second world war machine, then surged again afterwards durin; unprecedented expansion in production of, well, rything, from people to pollution to power tools.

By now we have made billions upon billions of radios, televisions, phones, copy machines, blenders, fax machines, bun-warmers, electric toothbrushes, washer-dryer sets, and all manner of electronic gadgets, most in just the last few generations. Add the factories to make all of this stuff, and the electricity to both factories and appliances. The armature of single 500 megawatt turbine generator uses about fifteen tons of copper wire. (4) Today, over half a n lion miles of transmission lines crisscross the US alone.

Mining "externalities"

But all this copper, lead, tin, zinc, and iron v not handed over on a silver platter. After the first nearly pure lumps and nodules were chipped out rock faces or fished out of streambeds, most of it was acquired only with much greater effort. It had to be mined, from deeper and deeper in the earth, or farther away. It then had to be concentrated and smelted, from poorer and poorer ores. Early copper mining used ores as rich as 20%, 30%, or sometimes even 50% copper. Today, ore as poor as 0.3 % is mined. (5)

The earliest smelting, for copper and lead, used trees to coax from rich ores the treasured metals. Wood that fed the flames that fired the bricks, heated the houses, cooked the food, and baked the bread was used also to feed the smelters. Forests receded from the villages, the riverbanks, the hillsides.

As early as 8000 years ago deforestation-caused soil erosion led to abandonment of villages in the...