Development of a Dynamic Material Flow Analysis Model for French Copper Cycle

Resource depletion leads government and industrials to a crucial question: will one resource still be available at a reasonable price in ten, twenty or even in a hundred years? This work is included in a more general project that addresses this issue by developing a new methodology for optimizing resources management. This study presents its first step, which is applied to the example of copper cycle management in France with the so-called Material Flow Analysis method. This paper shows that copper production and utilization are slowly decreasing while waste production is increasing. Moreover, the recycling rate is lower in France than in the rest of Europe, since there is neither copper extraction nor first transformation industry in France.