UNEP says copper demand will rise more than 40% by 2040 while mined output peaks around 2030, leaving a projected shortfall of 6.5 million tonnes within the next five years.
Demand for copper will rise more than 40% by 2040 while mined production is expected to peak around 2030 and then flatten or decline, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. The projection appears in a UNEP article published on 27 August on securing the materials the energy transition needs.
Copper carries electrification. Electric vehicles use up to four times as much of it as traditional combustion engines, and it runs through the wiring of everything that gets electrified. UNEP groups copper with lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earths as critical energy transition minerals.
“Critical energy transition minerals are one of the building blocks of the low carbon economy,” said Elisa Tonda, chief of resources and markets at UNEP. Demand for these minerals, driven also by data centres and consumer electronics, is on track to double by 2040. On a path to net zero by 2050 it would rise six-fold.
The gap in numbers
The peak-then-plateau projection for mined copper comes from a study by S&P Global. Against that, McKinsey and Company put total global copper supply, including all recyclable copper, at 30.1 million tonnes by 2031, with demand reaching 36.6 million tonnes over the same period. Without more raw copper production, that leaves a shortfall of 6.5 million tonnes within the next five years.
Recycling closes part of it
An estimated two-thirds of the copper produced over the past 100 years is still in use, shaped into wires and pipes that could be recovered. “Copper is completely, infinitely recyclable,” said Inka Guixà, chief executive of Spanish copper recycling company La Farga. “It can be refined and recycled again and again without losing properties. That’s why we have a duty to keep it in use.”
La Farga processes around 200,000 tonnes of copper a year at facilities in Spain and the United States, producing recycled copper rod that supplies the railway, automotive and electrical sectors. “One of the world’s greatest copper resources is all around us,” Guixà said. “It’s in construction, in railways, in data centres, in vehicles.”
Tonda framed the same point as an economic discipline. “We have to keep resources in the economy for as long as possible, circulating at their highest possible value,” she said.
Policy and the mining side
The European Union’s Circular Economy Act, likely to be adopted in late 2026, would establish a unified single market for secondary raw materials and double Europe’s circularity rate, the share of strategic raw materials recycled or reused, to 24% by 2030. Less than half of Europe’s electronic waste is currently collected for recycling. European legislation requires manufacturers to make electronic components easily removable, which cuts copper contamination of steel alloys.
Mining stays in the equation. The Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a UNEP partner, began offering an assessment and assurance programme in 2018 that evaluates industrial-scale mines against social and environmental standards.
“Mining is an industry with the incredible upside of providing materials we all need every day, and yet it is uniquely destructive in the way it gets those materials. Those impacts can last for centuries,” said Aimee Boulanger, the initiative’s executive director.
Boulanger tied responsible practice to supply security. “If we’ve got conflict driven by mining because it does harm, we don’t have a sustainable way to access these materials, because supply chains built on harm are going to be inherently fragile and unsustainable,” she said.
For industrial buyers the practical reading is that copper price and availability may set the pace of electrification through the 2030s ahead of technology readiness. Recycled supply is real and already large, and on UNEP’s own figures it does not close the gap alone. Procurement teams working electrification budgets out to 2031 should be testing them against a supply curve that flattens while their demand curve does not.
