A planetary atlas of material flowsOpening this view…
Start with an everyday object or material.
Jump directly to a material, regional account or named facility.
From desert mines to refineries, power grids and recovered scrap. Explore copper’s changing forms and the connections that carry this metal around the world.
Crushing, grinding and flotation concentrate copper minerals. Highland Valley Copper reports producing copper and molybdenum concentrates.
The remaining rock and tailings do not travel with all of the recovered copper.
At Horne, smelting and converting produce copper that is cast into anodes. Recycled inputs can enter this industrial route.
The operation also handles slag and sulfur-bearing streams; sulfuric acid is a reported co-product.
At CCR, electrorefining transfers copper onto cathodes. Some other elements collect in anode slimes and are processed separately.
Precious-metal recovery is a separate output path. Purity is not a recycling yield.
Fabricators make wire, tube and other copper products. Copper remains in use in buildings, equipment and electrical systems.
Copper installed in a building is a material stock, not immediate waste.
Collection, sorting and preparation determine which scrap can be remelted or sent through further smelting and refining.
Mixed materials and contamination affect recovery; a trade declaration is not a recovery rate.
Explore the local operations and regional systems that collect, transform and recover this material.
Checking available records…
Teck names the mine-to-Ashcroft connection in its 2022 transport announcement and describes overseas smelters as concentrate customers. This is an operator-described route, not a tracked shipment.
Ore and concentrate, unrefined metal, refined metal, wire and scrap are different traded goods. Compare the same form and reporting basis. Do not add successive border crossings into one copper-supply total.
Not from country trade statistics alone. Here you can inspect documented industrial connections and each country’s trade separately. A product-level trace would need its manufacturer and chain-of-custody records.