[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.