Europe is looking for new sources of copper. One of them is hiding in plain sight in Africa.
Not underground, but above it. Across the continent, growing quantities of copper and other valuable metals are already present in discarded electronics and other products. As consumption grows, this above-ground resource will grow with it. The question is not whether somebody will find value in these materials. They will. The more interesting question is who will develop the value chains around them, and who will benefit when they do.
Copper is hardly a well-kept secret. Electrification, renewable energy, data centres and expanding electricity grids all require enormous quantities of it. Global refined copper demand is expected to grow from around 27 million tonnes in 2024 to 34.5 million tonnes by 2035 (an increase of almost 30% in little more than a decade). New mines will be necessary, but so will much better use of the copper we already have.
There is an obvious sustainability argument too. Much of the copper we discard is already sitting above ground as relatively concentrated metal or alloy inside products. Compare that with mining and processing enormous quantities of rock to extract copper from ores that may contain around 0.5 – 1% copper. We have already spent the energy, carbon and capital required to get the metal out of the ground once. It seems sensible to get better at keeping it in circulation.
The Copper We Already Have
Recycling already makes a substantial contribution. Around 32% of annual copper use has come from recycled sources over the past decade. That is impressive, but it also means that despite copper being almost perfectly recyclable, roughly two-thirds of what we use still depends on primary resources.
Africa is part of this story in an interesting way. Its population is growing, its cities are expanding and more electronics and electrical equipment are entering its economies. Today’s products eventually become tomorrow’s secondary raw materials. The continent is therefore accumulating an increasingly valuable stock of metals above ground.
For more than a decade, my colleagues and I at Closing the Loop have worked on building collection systems for electronic waste in African countries. We started with mobile phones and later expanded to other electronics. Importantly, those systems were designed not as temporary clean-up projects, but as lasting value chains. By connecting demand from companies elsewhere in the world with collection capacity in Africa, we have seen collection become an economically sustainable activity rather than something that depends indefinitely on grants or goodwill.
One lesson from that experience is simple: calling something “waste” can obscure its economic potential. A discarded electronic product is also a small and rather complicated collection of commodities. The challenge is not proving that those commodities have value. It is building a system capable of recovering that value at scale.
Someone Will Develop This Resource
Valuable materials rarely wait patiently for policymakers to decide what should happen to them. Copper has value in Lagos just as it does in London. As volumes and global demand grow, businesses will find ways to recover it. Buyers will find suppliers and trade routes will develop.
The choice, therefore, is not really between developing Africa’s secondary resources and leaving them untouched. It is between different models for how they will be developed, and not all are equally attractive.
Today, less than 1% of Africa’s e-waste is documented as formally collected and recycled, compared with more than 40% in Europe. That gap represents more than a recycling challenge. It is an economic opportunity still largely up for grabs. Without attractive formal alternatives, informal, improper or illegal recycling and trading networks have plenty of room to capture the growing value of these materials.
Europe’s opportunity is therefore not simply to compete for the copper at the end of that chain. It is to help build a better chain in the first place: one that combines responsible collection and processing with transparency, environmental standards and local economic value.
Europe needs more diversified access to raw materials, while African economies need investment, employment, technical capacity and stronger industries. Recycling offers an unusual opportunity for those interests to coincide. But that requires building material value chains with African economies, rather than simply extracting valuable materials from them.
A functioning recycling industry starts with collection, but it does not end there. Collection at scale requires logistics, finance, aggregation and reliable markets. The more of that chain that can sensibly be developed locally, the greater the opportunity to create skilled jobs, businesses and technical expertise alongside the recovered metals.
This does not mean every circuit board collected in Africa should also be refined there. Europe has some of the world’s most sophisticated recycling facilities, and specialist international recyclers will remain essential. Economics, technology and scale will determine where different processing steps make sense.
But there is a large space between exporting mixed waste and insisting that every final gram of copper must be refined locally. Better sorting, dismantling and pre-processing can turn waste into higher-value secondary raw materials. There is a fundamental difference between exporting waste because no local alternative exists and trading a processed copper concentrate on an international market. Both involve a ship leaving a port. Economically, they are very different ships.
A Virtuous Circle
There is another reason to care about local processing, and it follows directly from what we have learned at Closing the Loop. Our collection work showed that reliable demand can create collection capacity. What we are now exploring in Nigeria is what happens when that same principle is extended further down the value chain.
Conventional wisdom says processing capacity follows collection: first collect enough material, then build the facilities to process it. In practice, causality can run in both directions. Better processing creates stronger and more predictable demand for material. That gives collectors greater confidence to invest. More collection creates larger volumes, which support further investment in processing. What looks like a waste-management problem starts behaving more like an industrial ecosystem.
This is the opportunity we increasingly see at Closing the Loop. Done well, investment in secondary-material value chains can provide Europe with more diversified sources of copper and other metals while supporting businesses, employment and industrial capability in African economies. It can also make more material worth collecting in the first place.
There are easier ways to buy copper. Building new value chains takes time, investment and partnerships. The alternative, however, is not that this resource remains untouched. Growing demand makes that unlikely. Someone will build the commercial relationships needed to recover it. The question is whether those relationships encourage responsible recycling and local value creation, or simply find the quickest route to the metal.
Europe therefore has a choice. It can view Africa’s growing stock of secondary materials mainly as another source of commodities to import. Or it can help build the infrastructure and businesses that allow more value to be created before those commodities enter the global market.
Europe needs more copper. Africa wants more industrial development. Hidden in what we currently call waste is an opportunity to contribute to both.
We just need to get better at mining copper without a mine.
