It has been decades since scrap copper was recycled at the Miami smelter, but a trial run that began last year is changing all that.
Turns out that if done right, this endeavor presents a few notable opportunities for the company:
- It’s a moneymaker.
- It uses excess smelter capacity in the anode plant, increasing plant efficiency.
- It provides environmental, social and governance benefits to the site and company.
“From our perspective, this project ticks every box that you could hope for, and the operations team at Miami has done a superb job at managing, sampling, and processing what is new material to us,” said Michael Ryback, Strategic Category Manager, Transportation-Phoenix.
While the potential benefits of recycling copper are clear, the process isn’t.
“The sales team did an amazing job researching and ensuring the economic viability of remelting clean copper scrap at Miami,” said Mark Albertsen, General Manager-Miami. “It is a fairly complicated process flow from receipt, sampling, analysis, remelt and conversion to anode and invoicing. That all being said, it has a favorable netback in cash for Miami and the Americas.”
Albertsen noted the positive results of the recycling trial are even more impressive when considering smelter employees were so focused on the core business that the team also set records for throughput of copper concentrate and production of sulfuric acid in 2022.
The company buys from one dealer to help ensure it is premium, responsibly sourced copper scrap. That dealer is headquartered in El Paso, which is where Miami’s anode copper gets refined at the company’s El Paso rod mill and refinery.
Sample size indicator of success
The scrap the company buys is about 97 percent copper. Miami does considerable work to get it to match its 99.97 percent copper, which El Paso then refines to 99.99 percent. From September through December, Miami purchased and processed about 2.6 million pounds. Potentially, Miami could recycle 30,000 tons a year.
For Miami’s Chief Chemist, Steve Calvo, the process has worked well, just as it has at the company’s sister smelter at Atlantic Copper in Huelva, Spain.
“Atlantic Copper has for many years proven how successful this can be,” Calvo said.
The endeavor to take in homely scrap and recycle it into Freeport-quality copper has become a point of pride for Jamie Lindemann, Manager, Raw Materials, Logistics, Sales and Marketing-Phoenix.
“We were able to identify a business that not only benefited the bottom line, but is huge on sustainability and environmental benefits,” Lindemann said. “We are taking copper that's already out there, refining it and bringing it back into our process, and I think for a frontline employee, that says a lot about the company.”