At first I thought “Isn’t copper really rare, surely there isn’t enough copper to plate all of the door knobs and other surfaces of the worlds hospitals.”

As it turns out we’ve only mined 12% of known copper reserves and once mined copper stays in circulation almost indefinitely because of it’s very high recycle rate.

Can we extract this wealth of materials cost effectively while respecting the ecosystems adjacent to them? What would a high-tech mine look like?