The contemporary Latin American copper cycle: one year stocks and flows

摘要

Substance flow cycles quantify the material flows from natural to anthropogenic reservoirs and the associated environmental losses. This paper traces the flow of copper as it enters and leaves the Latin American (LA) economy in the early 1990s. Material Flow analysis (MFA) was used to determine copper flows, including the amount of metal that enters use in society and waste repositories. A database that records temporal and spatial boundary conditions was developed for continental MFA. The result provides a numerical accounting of copper from ore, to product, to potential secondary resource. The majority of copper is mined, smelted, and refined inside of LA; about three-fourths of that amount is exported from the continent. The remainder is fabricated within LA and enters the societal use reservoir in infrastructure, buildings, industry, private households, and other uses. The majority of copper in finished products is contained in pure form (70%, 212 Gg out of 305 Gg), the remainder in alloy form. Copper from post-consumer waste is roughly ten times smaller than waste from copper production. The different applications of copper identified in this model indicate that most of the copper processed during the last decade still resides in society, mostly in non-dissipative uses.