[roeme]

I presume that over the next decade(s), Cu may be phased out and replaced by Fibre on a large scale for information transfer purposes.

I do wonder about the effects on our environment though, namely wether making copper (metal) or Fibre cables (plastics) produces more waste, uses more or less energy and which one's easier to recycle, and to what degree.

[ghshephard]

Most of the high speed connection (10GigE+) for the last 3+ years have already been fiber, and anything longer than 100m is always fiber - it's pretty rare to see copper used for anything faster than 1 Gig connections.

[DiabloD3]

They still use copper on 10gbit in some places for rack-local connections through both cat6 and passive sfp+ cables

[ghshephard]

Yup, and, ironically, my last 10Gig deployment (2009) was 100% copper from the server to the switches - but it was a pain in the butt trying to get it to work, and I don't think I would ever try doing anything but fiber between my network elements for 10 Gig.

[davidad_]

Naïvely, glass is made from sand and copper is mined. And I can already recycle glass from my house, but not copper. So it looks like an environmental win to me. There may be something I'm missing.

[kabdib]

Don't get hung up on the "green" characteristics of just the active component. You have to look at the whole picture, including packaging and manufacturing. It's not like the choice is between melting a little sand or an old bottle and digging a big hole in the ground to extract copper.

- There's a lot of plastic involved, for either medium

- optical stuff is pretty exacting to manufacture. It's easily possible that it's more energy-intensive to refine the materials, make the lasers, draw the fibers and so on than it is to make the copper equivalent

[rosser]

While it's definitely exacting, AFAIK, they still use plain ol' gravity to draw the individual glass fibers.

[shalmanese]

Copper is pretty trivially recyclable, which is why you get reports of drug addicts stealing copper piping from people's houses to sell on the black market.

[bigd]

And bridges!!! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/bridge-stolen-in-cz...

[bluedino]

Pipes, wires, metal decorations, air conditioning condensers, old electronics...

[HCIdivision17]

I think the real account is in the phenomenal energy costs to convert the mines material to a final form. The glass is going to be mined as well, as even the cheap soda lime glass we see everywhere has many ingredients, and I would be surprised if the typical fiber was made of such cheap material (went and checked, and the optical fibers are likely to be doped and tuned to the application). A furnace consumes huge amounts of energy, for both refineries and glass plants (I worked at a glass plant, and the size of the natural gas line running to it 24/7 full open was shocking). Recycling helps (since the material stores some of the original energy), but there still needs to be a process to remove impurities.

As a sibling comment noted, green energy probably isn't what we would hope it to be.

[mariusz79]

Copper wires are usually isolated with plastic :)