New anxiety just dropped: we’re running out of copper — and that’s a big problem, not just because it means fewer lucky pennies.
Per Fortune, we need copper to build things like water pipes, computers, and phones. Not to mention electric vehicles, and solar and wind power infrastructure.
… we’ve been wasting precious copper resources for thousands of years:
Jetti Resources — a startup backed by some of the world’s biggest miners, and recently valued at $2.5B — aims to repurpose all that previously discarded ore.
Enter the rock-munchin’ microbes:
If the mining OGs are ready to share their rocks, tech like Jetti’s could produce 8m additional tons of copper each year by the 2040s.
That’s a lot of lucky pennies.