European Copper Streams 2012

After all these colorful Sankey diagrams, here is something soothing for your eyes.

This b/w Sankey diagram shows European copper streams in 2012. It is taken from the 2017 dissertation by Simon Gloser-Chahoud of Technical University Clausthal in Germany with the woooh title ‘Quantitative Analyse der Kritikalität mineralischer und metallischer Rohstoffe unter Verwendung eines systemdynamischen Modell-Ansatzes’ (‘Quantitative analysis of the criticality of mineral and metallic raw materials using a system-dynamic model approach’ …thanks Google Translate!).

Flows are in kt. The dotted line references the geographical boundary of the EU-27 states. We can see that 1.100 kt copper concentrate was imported and 830 kt came from mines in Europe. Import and export of finished products containing copper is almost balanced. The overall addition of copper to the European stock (estimated at 90.000 kt) was at 3.200 kt. Copper in waste streams leaving this stock amounted to 2.500 kt, of which 1.750 kt were fed back into the copper production.

2 Comments

  1. Bruno Hannart says:

    very nice, but how is it generated ?

  2. phineas says:

    @ Bruno: in regard to data, the values are generated from a System Dynamics Model using import and export data from a trade database (UN Comtrade) and from other sources. For details on the EU27 copper model see p. 118 ff. and for the System Dynamics Model see p. 109 of the linked dissertation. There is also a global copper model (Sankey diagram on p. 114). As for the actual Sankey diagram, this has been drawn using e!Sankey (see list of Sankey diagram software)

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