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Copper & Electrical Materials

The catalogue

Copper & Electrical Materials

The metals that carry current, from a house wire to a national grid.

Copper wire rod produced by LS Cable & System · Lsgeeks · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

2 materials shown. Figures are from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 · as each source defines it for each commodity · source ↗

Scroll the table sideways for the remaining columns.

MaterialShelf World production 2025 World reserves Leading producer U.S. imported
Copper criticalThe reddish metal that carries electricity better than anything except silver, and which humans…
Copper & Electrical Materials 23,000thousand metric tons · Mine production 980,000 Chile23% of world production —
Aluminium criticalA light silvery metal made by passing an enormous electric current through dissolved bauxite —…
Copper & Electrical Materials 74,000thousand metric tons · Smelter production — China61% of world production† 60%

† Worked out from the USGS production table: the leading country’s output divided by the world total. Where the USGS publishes the share itself, that figure is shown instead.

Photographs on this page · 3
  1. Copper wire rod produced by LS Cable & System.jpg · Lsgeeks · CC BY-SA 3.0
  2. Chalcopyrite botroïdale.jpg · Didier Descouens · CC BY-SA 3.0
  3. Aluminum ingots at Norwegian Aluminium Company.jpg · Anders Beer Wilse · CC BY 4.0

Every photograph is from Wikimedia Commons and is used under the licence shown.

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