ASK DEAN:
Recycling copper wire
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Get paid for that old wire.

By Dean Gallea

Q: Isn’t all that ugly black spaghetti wiring hanging on our utility poles made of copper that could be recycled? It seems like there’s more than there should be, so why do they just leave it there?

A: Yes! Most of the wires you see hanging on utility poles have copper conductors, which, like aluminum, is infinitely recyclable, and requires less energy to do so than mining and refining new copper.

It even has some value: The Brookfield Scrap yard in Elmsford (Google it for location) will pay 35 cents to $1.43 per pound for insulated copper wire, depending on how thick the insulation is.

I’ve brought lots of old cable there over the years to keep it out of the waste stream, and made a few bucks in the process.

It’s easy to do, and you get paid in cash. You can bring copper and brass pipes and fittings, too.

There are a bunch of services on the utility poles: going from top to bottom, you have the high-voltage distribution lines, then the lower-voltage ones that go to our homes and businesses, then the Altice TV/Internet cables, then the Verizon lines that used to be all copper phone lines, but now include the FiOS fiber lines.

All of this wiring is probably in use EXCEPT most of the ancient Verizon copper phone lines, which comprise the majority of the ugly, tangled messes we see.

Over a decade ago, when Verizon strung its FiOS fiber-optic lines through our neighborhoods, they left their copper wiring in place, since switching to FiOS was only an option, not a requirement for phone subscribers. Since then, almost all “landline” phone connections have switched over to one of the major cable communications carriers in our villages, leaving the old copper wiring “abandoned in place”.

There are no local laws requiring the utilities to remove their old infrastructure, and even the value of the cabling as scrap is apparently not enough of an economic incentive, given the labor costs, to go through the process or separating and removing the unused wires.

Maybe public pressure to improve our visual environment could produce legislation to force recycling this old copper.

As an aside, the Metro North Railroad also has a lot of old, abandoned signal and power wiring along their right-of-way. They’ve begun to remove some of it, but not before thieves started climbing poles and removing it for their own enrichment. There were notable instances of thieves being electrocuted when they didn’t realize sections of the old cables were still “live”!