🪱 Bringing Copper Home — Red Metals’ debut today TLDR; Copper is the workhorse of electrifying everything. We need to refine more copper in the next 25 years than in all of human history. FastCompany: “The world faces a looming copper shortage: By 2040, demand could grow by 50%, driven by everything from electric cars to the surge in data centers. At the same time, supply is expected to drop, leaving a shortfall of 10 million metric tons, according to an S&P analysis. Already, supply shortages have pushed copper prices to record highs this year. In Charleston, South Carolina, a startup called Red Metals is racing to build more American supply through urban mining—pulling copper from old products and scrap rather than extracting the metal from increasingly depleted copper mines. Right now, only around half of the copper in existing products is recovered at their end of life. In the U.S., the scrap that’s recycled is often sent overseas for refining before being sent back. At the same time, demand is growing throughout the global economy. Transportation is electrifying. Households are electrifying. The number of air conditioners keeps growing as the planet gets hotter. All require copper. And data centers are a massive source of new demand: A single hyperscale data center can use, by one estimate, 50,000 tons of copper in cooling systems and power equipment. …humanoid robots could also be a major new source of demand. At its $70 million facility under construction in South Carolina, Red Metals will use AI to sort copper from discarded products, from motors to Christmas lights, and turn it into copper rod that customers can use to make products like wire. The process skips several intermediate steps that usually come between recovered copper and rod, including concentrate, matte, anode, and cathode, helping make recycled American copper cost-competitive. Switzer compares the process to Nucor, a steel manufacturer that changed how scrap steel could be made directly into new sheets of metal. “They did it at a much smaller scale, and all the major steel producers like U.S. Steel dismissed them, [thinking that] because they’re out there at a small scale there’s no way they can compete,” he says. “Fast forward to now; Nucor is the largest steel producer in the United States and other legacy steel producers have gone bust.” — from For America, copper is a critical input for many of the nation’s most important industries and technologies, including electrical infrastructure, batteries, data centers, defense systems, and advanced manufacturing. U.S. copper demand is projected to increase by more than one million metric tons annually through 2035, contributing to a domestic market expected to exceed $45 billion. At the same time, American copper production capacity has steadily declined, and the U.S. is projected to face a refined copper supply gap of more than 2.5 million metric tons of refined copper annually by 2035, even if every major announced mining project comes online. We export 950K tons of copper scrap each year, one of the world's largest exporters, with over 40% going to China. If refined and recycled domestically, that scrap would meaningfully reduce our reliance on imported copper and strengthen the resilience of the domestic supply chain. Recycling starts with a 60x better feedstock than mining ore, which is 99% rock. And copper can be recycled repeatedly without losing its properties. Let’s make it so. Now hiring: FD: Future Ventures is a seed investor in this fast company.