In remote Quebec, the mining giant Glencore is turning America’s electronic trash back into treasure. WSJ reporter Ryan Dezember joins host Belle Lin to talk about how recycled copper could help meet the demands of the energy transition and data boom. Plus, a look at a new Transportation Security Administration program that allows travelers to use their faces for identity verification at airport security checkpoints.
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[00:00:27] Welcome to Tech News Briefing.
[00:00:37] It's Thursday, November 21st. I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal.
[00:00:41] The TSA is offering a new program that allows travelers to use their faces for identity verification at the airport.
[00:00:49] No driver's license required. We'll find out how the program works and how you can sign up.
[00:00:55] And then one of the world's biggest miners is digging into junk drawers and landfills to source the copper needed for the energy transition and data boom.
[00:01:07] Our reporter Ryan Dezember tells us how electronic trash is being turned into treasure.
[00:01:13] But first, a new TSA program, now available at nine nationwide airports, allows travelers to use facial recognition tech to zip through security checkpoints.
[00:01:27] WSJ's James Rundle spoke with our reporter, Alison Pauley, about the program and privacy considerations around the tech.
[00:01:34] Here's their conversation.
[00:01:35] What are the benefits that the TSA is touting for people who sign up?
[00:01:39] They say it's more secure from their standpoint because they are able to do the identity verification based on preloaded information that already exists.
[00:01:49] So, for example, this identity verification is based on either someone's passport photo or perhaps their global entry picture.
[00:01:58] So that means these travelers are already part of an approved trusted traveler program where they had to opt in and go through extra screening to be able to get that status.
[00:02:09] When they're standing there, the verification happens much faster than it does with the driver's license or with the boarding pass.
[00:02:16] So it is more secure and TSA says makes things more efficient as well.
[00:02:22] How do the savings and time compare with these existing programs?
[00:02:25] So TSA says that it takes an average of six to eight seconds.
[00:02:31] Of course, that varies based on location and time of day.
[00:02:35] Regular TSA pre-check takes 18 to 20 seconds to pass through.
[00:02:40] So the program uses facial recognition technology, as you said, which is everywhere right now.
[00:02:45] But there are still concerns about its use from civil liberties activists, privacy advocates and others.
[00:02:51] How are the people you spoke with who are using the program thinking about this?
[00:02:55] So the people I spoke with are drawing a line between this and other types of facial recognition verification.
[00:03:02] These people already have submitted their information to the government.
[00:03:06] So they've opted in.
[00:03:07] What they're doing is they're part of global entry or TSA pre-check.
[00:03:13] And they have their passport registered with the government as well.
[00:03:16] So they've already given their identity related to their traveler profile to the government.
[00:03:21] What this is doing is taking a photo of them in the moment and matching that to a picture that the government already has.
[00:03:29] Now, some travelers did say if this becomes the standard method of screening and it's not optional, that would be problematic for them.
[00:03:37] But at this point, it's a totally opt-in process, which makes people feel more comfortable with it.
[00:03:42] They don't have to do it.
[00:03:44] So the biometric data isn't being stored with the airlines.
[00:03:47] It's being stored with the government.
[00:03:48] Correct.
[00:03:49] So I spoke with Delta and United Airlines.
[00:03:52] They already offer this type of technology.
[00:03:54] And they don't do any of the identity verification.
[00:03:57] So you mentioned Delta.
[00:03:58] Where is it currently being offered and which airlines are signed up?
[00:04:01] So right now, Delta and United offer it.
[00:04:04] And there are nine airports between the two of them.
[00:04:07] In addition to the New York airports, it is at DCA, LAX, Chicago's O'Hare, Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Detroit.
[00:04:16] And are there any restrictions currently on who can use this?
[00:04:20] Yes.
[00:04:20] So you have to have a passport.
[00:04:23] You have to be a member of TSA PreCheck, whether through that program or through benefits from global entry.
[00:04:31] And you have to have an airline frequent traveler number, which means you have a profile with the airline.
[00:04:39] So you're registered in the app and you preload all of this information into your app with the particular airline.
[00:04:46] So it's there when you show up to the airport and when you check in for your flight.
[00:04:51] And if you're flying United right now, you have to be the only person on your reservation.
[00:04:57] And are there plans to expand that out in the future?
[00:04:59] There are.
[00:04:59] So United says that in the coming weeks, travelers on multi-party reservations will be able to do this.
[00:05:05] And other airlines are joining the program as well.
[00:05:08] So Alaska and American Airlines expect to be able to offer this to their travelers in the coming months.
[00:05:14] But no specific date has been set yet for when it will be offered.
[00:05:18] That was WSJ's James Rundle speaking with our reporter, Alison Poley.
[00:05:23] Coming up, why the old phones and cords in your junk drawer may be more valuable than you think.
[00:05:31] After the break.
[00:05:42] The hunt for copper is on.
[00:05:45] What's driving the demand?
[00:05:46] Shifting from fossil fuels to more renewable electricity means we'll need a lot more lithium for electric vehicle batteries and copper for everything electric.
[00:05:57] Glencore, a mining giant, estimates that the global copper supply must grow by 1 million metric tons a year through 2050.
[00:06:07] And that would require adding the equivalent of the world's biggest mine each year.
[00:06:13] For more on how smelters like Glencore are filling the gap with trash, we're joined by WSJ reporter Ryan Dezember.
[00:06:21] Ryan, what's unique about copper and where is Glencore sourcing it?
[00:06:25] Copper is interesting because unlike a lot of commodities, we think of like oil and wheat and natural gas.
[00:06:32] Once we use it, it's gone.
[00:06:34] Copper never goes away.
[00:06:35] It's always there.
[00:06:36] And there's been a lot of copper mined throughout human history.
[00:06:39] A lot of it's in our houses, you know, in wiring and plumbing for drinking water.
[00:06:44] It's in our cars, in our phones and computers, out in the power lines.
[00:06:48] But there's a lot of it in the trash and junkyards.
[00:06:52] And so there's efforts to go out and find that.
[00:06:54] The reasons why they do that is it's actually easier in a lot of cases to find that than it is to get a new geologic mine.
[00:07:01] It takes decades to get a new mine from when they discover the deposits of the ore to the first production.
[00:07:09] So when there's a quick shock to demand like there has been now for all the renewable energy production,
[00:07:15] as well as things like data centers and every new iPhone, that's a new batch of copper.
[00:07:19] And that stuff, they can't really respond by going out and finding a new deposit and mining it in the traditional way.
[00:07:26] So the price goes up and that incentivizes scrappers and makes the companies that process it come up with new ways to get amounts of copper that might not have been economical to retrieve in the past.
[00:07:37] Like when they shredded cars.
[00:07:38] They took out the easy stuff, but they threw away a lot.
[00:07:42] Now the price is high enough to go back into the landfills and get that out.
[00:07:45] And so Glencore, a company that I visited in Canada, they're sort of making all these efforts to go and get this stuff.
[00:07:52] And these are very industrial processes.
[00:07:54] Excavating old auto landfills.
[00:07:56] You know, working directly with manufacturers to get their waste and, you know, their factory floor choppings and things like that.
[00:08:03] Okay, let's talk about your visit to Glencore's mine in Quebec.
[00:08:08] What was the scale of the processing like there?
[00:08:11] What did you see?
[00:08:12] Tell us a bit about the scene.
[00:08:14] Well, it's a 97-year-old copper smelter and it was built up there in Quebec in the middle of nowhere, basically.
[00:08:20] It's like 400 miles northwest of Montreal, deep in the taiga.
[00:08:24] And the mine ran out in the 70s.
[00:08:26] So they wanted to keep the smelter going.
[00:08:29] So they bring copper concentrate from all over the world, Latin America, the southwest U.S., other mines in Canada and Asia.
[00:08:37] But they've always augmented it since the copper mine ran out with electronics, e-waste as we often call it.
[00:08:45] And they were sort of a pioneer up there.
[00:08:47] It was before Glencore owned it in recycling that stuff.
[00:08:50] And it's really fascinating because you see these piles of stuff.
[00:08:54] And some of it you can tell exactly what it is, old cell phones that are chopped to bits.
[00:08:58] Other stuff looks like big piles of dirt.
[00:09:00] And that's old cars shredded so finely that at a glance you'd think it's a pile of dirt or mulch.
[00:09:06] You grab a handful, it's very clear, it's very heavy metallic waste.
[00:09:10] And that stuff is fed with copper concentrate.
[00:09:13] They have a chief metallurgist, they call him the chef.
[00:09:17] And he kind of is balancing all day long this chemical reaction because there's a lot of other stuff.
[00:09:23] You know, you think of a circuit board, there's plastic, there's other metals, there's all sorts of materials that aren't copper, gold or silver.
[00:09:30] And so they're always adjusting that recipe to compensate for things that add heat to the fire or change the chemistry.
[00:09:37] And they're making a lot of investments so that they can take more, a greater portion of recycled material and less concentrate.
[00:09:44] And this stuff is piled 30 feet high and they're constantly getting new shipments from all over the world.
[00:09:49] And no amount of copper really is too small for them to take.
[00:09:53] They get envelopes of materials, those small boxes that you'd ship to your friends along with train cars full.
[00:10:00] They even have a collection box out front for the towns.
[00:10:04] You know, their old wires and their broken toasters and their, you know, old cell phones.
[00:10:08] Should we all be digging through our junk drawers, looking for those utensils and toasters and bringing them to our local miner?
[00:10:16] Yeah.
[00:10:16] Well, I would say it's everybody has those drawers or those boxes of old wires, right?
[00:10:21] And you think, what are these good for?
[00:10:23] If you can find a place to take them, they're going to be recycled.
[00:10:26] If you're dealing with metals, even something that you don't think has a lot of metal in it, like an old calculator or your old iPhone cords, those have value.
[00:10:35] You might not get any money for them, but they have value to be reused.
[00:10:39] And whatever we reuse is something we don't have to mine out of the ground as a society.
[00:10:44] So the proportion of mined to recycled copper, it's not quite an even breakdown right now.
[00:10:51] But with greater efforts being put into recycling and scrapping and all of that, will that proportion start to change?
[00:10:59] And by how much?
[00:11:00] Well, that's sort of hard to say, but there are like facilities being built in the U.S.
[00:11:04] There's two under construction by two different German firms in the southeast.
[00:11:08] Their whole point is to take scrap copper and recycle it and produce material ready for manufacturing of new products.
[00:11:15] The smelter in Quebec is a little unique.
[00:11:18] And it's the sort of thing that's really hard to build nowadays with modern labor and construction costs and environmental regulations,
[00:11:25] which is why it makes sense to take this material from San Jose, California and Providence, Rhode Island.
[00:11:31] And, you know, Glencore just bought another facility in Arkansas.
[00:11:35] That's why it makes sense to take it there, because it's very hard to build these things.
[00:11:39] There's only a few smelters in all of North America.
[00:11:42] As copper concentrate becomes harder to get and more expensive, which is the copper mined from the ground,
[00:11:48] you're going to see more recycled material going in.
[00:11:50] That was our scrappy reporter, Ryan Dezember.
[00:11:54] And that's it for Tech News Briefing.
[00:11:57] Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Catherine Millsop.
[00:12:03] Logging off, I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal.
[00:12:07] We'll sign back in this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute.
[00:12:10] Thanks for listening.