How much lower is the carbon figure for copper rod made from scrap?
Usually much lower than primary copper, because mining, concentrating and smelting ore are skipped. What remains is the furnace fuel and electricity to melt and refine the scrap, plus collection and transport. Work it out from your own fuel and power per tonne, and state the recycled share on every buyer figure.
What counts
- Furnace fuel or electricity for melting and fire refining.
- Electrolytic refining power, if used.
- Transport of scrap to the plant.
- Losses and dross handling.
Recycled share
Buyers want the share of recycled input next to the figure. Keep scrap purchase records by grade and tonnes.
Allocation
Scrap usually enters with no upstream emissions under the common cut off approach. Say which approach you used.
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), GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard
Last reviewed 2026-10-21.