The Looming Copper Shortage: How a South Carolina Startup Is Mining Metal From Waste

A Global Copper Crisis Is Coming—And It's Closer Than You Think

Copper is everywhere. It runs through the walls of your home, the engine of your car, and the server racks powering your favorite streaming platform. But the world is quietly heading toward a copper crisis that could disrupt nearly every sector of the modern economy. According to an analysis by S&P Global, global copper demand could surge by as much as 50% by 2040, while supply continues to tighten—creating a projected shortfall of 10 million metric tons. Prices have already hit record highs in 2025 as early supply pressures take hold, sending shockwaves through industries that depend on steady access to the metal.

The drivers behind this demand explosion are well-known but accelerating fast: electric vehicles, renewable energy infrastructure, and the explosive growth of AI-powered data centers are all copper-hungry industries expanding at an unprecedented pace. Meanwhile, existing copper mines are aging and becoming less productive. New mining projects take a decade or more to come online and face growing environmental and regulatory scrutiny. The math simply doesn't add up—and the gap between supply and demand is widening every year.

What Is Urban Mining—And Why Does It Matter?

While traditional mining digs deep into the earth to extract raw ore, urban mining takes a fundamentally different approach: it recovers valuable metals from the products we've already made. Think old electric motors, discarded appliances, industrial machinery, and end-of-life electronics. These items contain significant concentrations of copper that, in most cases, are never fully recovered.

Currently, only about half of the copper embedded in existing products is actually recycled when those products reach the end of their useful lives. The other half is lost—buried in landfills, exported overseas in mixed scrap, or simply abandoned. In the United States, much of the scrap that is collected gets shipped to Asia for refining, only to be imported back in finished form. It's a logistically wasteful, carbon-intensive, and geopolitically fragile process that leaves the U.S. unnecessarily dependent on foreign processing capacity.

Urban mining closes that loop. By processing scrap domestically and recovering copper at high efficiency, it has the potential to dramatically reduce dependence on new ore extraction while building a more resilient, American-centered supply chain.

Meet Red Metals: The Charleston Startup Reinventing Copper Recycling

Based in Charleston, South Carolina, a startup called Red Metals is positioning itself at the forefront of this urban mining movement. Founded by Jackson Switzer, a former engineer at Redwood Materials—the lithium-ion battery recycling giant backed by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel—Red Metals was born from a simple but powerful observation: enormous quantities of recoverable copper are sitting in discarded products across the country, and the infrastructure to efficiently reclaim that copper simply doesn't exist at scale.

Switzer spent years at Redwood Materials watching how copper flowed through the battery recycling process and how demand for the material was growing on every front. "Copper is used absolutely everywhere, and it's so critical to nearly everything," he has said. But the supply chain, he argues, "was designed for a different era." The current system is highly fragmented, relying on a patchwork of small scrap dealers, overseas refiners, and intermediaries that introduce cost, delay, and inefficiency at every step.

Red Metals aims to replace that fragmented model with a streamlined domestic operation—collecting copper-rich scrap, processing it locally, and returning refined copper to U.S. manufacturers. JB Straubel himself is an investor in the company, a notable endorsement from one of the most respected engineers and entrepreneurs in the clean energy space.

Why the U.S. Supply Chain for Copper Is Broken

The inefficiency of the current copper recycling ecosystem is striking when you look at it closely. The United States generates enormous quantities of copper-containing scrap every year, yet a large portion of it leaves the country for processing. This not only undermines domestic manufacturing competitiveness but also creates strategic vulnerabilities. As geopolitical tensions rise and global trade becomes increasingly uncertain, relying on foreign refining capacity for a critical industrial metal is a significant risk.

There's also the environmental angle. Shipping scrap metal across oceans, refining it abroad, and shipping the finished product back generates a substantial carbon footprint. Urban mining, done domestically and efficiently, can dramatically reduce the emissions associated with copper production compared to both overseas recycling and virgin ore extraction.

The Role of Copper in the Clean Energy Transition

One of the most underappreciated facts about the clean energy transition is just how copper-intensive it is. A single electric vehicle contains roughly two to four times more copper than a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle. Offshore wind turbines require enormous quantities of copper wiring. Solar installations depend on copper cabling for power transmission. And the AI data centers now being built at record speed to power large language models and cloud computing are voracious consumers of copper in their cooling systems, power distribution networks, and server infrastructure.

In short, the technologies we're counting on to decarbonize the economy are the very same technologies driving copper demand to unsustainable levels. Without a dramatic expansion of both primary mining and secondary recycling, the clean energy transition itself could be bottlenecked by copper scarcity.

Can Urban Mining Fill the Gap?

Urban mining alone won't solve the entire copper shortfall—the numbers are simply too large. But it can play a meaningful and rapidly scalable role in reducing the deficit, particularly in markets like the United States where large volumes of recoverable copper are going to waste. Improving the end-of-life recovery rate from the current ~50% to something approaching 80% or 90% would represent a massive injection of new supply without a single new mine being opened.

Startups like Red Metals are betting that with the right technology, operational focus, and investment, this is achievable. And with copper prices at record highs, the economics have never been more favorable for recyclers who can process scrap efficiently and at scale.

The Bigger Picture: Building a Resilient Critical Minerals Strategy

The story of Red Metals is part of a larger conversation happening across industry and government about critical minerals security. Copper, alongside lithium, cobalt, and nickel, has been identified as essential to both the clean energy transition and national economic security. Building domestic processing and recycling capacity for these materials isn't just good business—it's a strategic imperative.

As policymakers look for ways to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains for critical inputs, urban mining companies occupy a uniquely promising position: they can scale relatively quickly, operate without the environmental controversy of new mines, and leverage the vast stockpile of recoverable metals already present in the existing built environment. For a country sitting on decades worth of scrap copper in aging infrastructure and discarded products, the opportunity is substantial.

Red Metals and its peers won't solve the copper shortage overnight. But they represent a crucial piece of the puzzle—and a compelling vision of what a smarter, more circular approach to critical minerals could look like in the decades ahead.