Gómez, Guzmán & Tilton, "Copper recycling and scrap availability" (Resources Policy 32(4), 2007)

Disposition: stated. Abstract read in full (ADS and the UC Chile catalogue) on 2026-10-19; paper not read. Tilton is the author of the "opportunity-cost paradigm" already on ore-grade-depletion-debate.

What: an econometric test of whether the growing stock of old copper scrap feeds secondary production. Why: it answers whether scrap acts as a ceiling on the copper price when primary extraction gets dear, which is one possible answer to the steer's question of what has kept real copper prices flat. Bears on macro-view.

Key points, as read:

• Available old copper scrap more than tripled over 40 years; secondary production from old scrap only doubled, and stagnated over the ten years to 2007 while primary production grew.
• The stock of old scrap left unrecycled in earlier years (because it was too costly) has "a very modest impact" on secondary production. The annual flow of end-of-life scrap matters more, but is only about 4% of the available old scrap in any year.
• Corroboration, snippet only: Fu et al. (MIT, 2017), "refined copper scrap supply is price inelastic, and its main drivers are world GDP" (https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstreams/cf99f010-792e-4e8c-8c68-19cef8293cde/download; the full text returned HTTP 429).

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2007.08.002 ; abstract at http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007RePol..32..183G/abstract (read 2026-10-19)

Backlinks: macro-view, wallsten-urban-infrastructure-mines, trail-2026-10-19