What makes up the carbon footprint of a tonne of copper cathode?
Mining and concentrating ore, usually the largest share and heavy on diesel and electricity; smelting and converting; and electrolytic refining, which is mostly electricity. The grid behind the mine and refinery decides much of the total, so cathode from a coal heavy grid can carry several times the figure of cathode refined on clean power.
Stages
- Mine: haul trucks, crushing and grinding, often the biggest part.
- Concentrator: flotation power.
- Smelter: fuel and oxygen.
- Refinery: electricity for electrolysis.
Primary vs recycled
Cathode refined from scrap skips mining and concentrating, so its figure is usually much lower. Ask the supplier for the recycled share.
Using it
Ask your supplier for a cradle to gate figure with year and boundary. If you must use an average, name the source and mark it as an estimate.
What Senseible does here
Senseible reads fuel, electricity and freight invoices into a dated, fingerprinted record per site, so a copper product figure can be traced back to the documents behind it. Factors outside India are entered from the official source and labelled.
Sources: ISO 14067:2018 Carbon footprint of products (iso.org), IPCC 2006 Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, International Energy Agency, country energy data (iea.org)
Last reviewed 2026-10-21.