Mary Poulton Weighs In on Copper Extraction for The Verge

A recent article in online tech journal The Verge points out that more clean energy will require more materials to create clean energy technologies, and Professor Emerita Mary Poulton lent her expertise to the subject.

Though copper isn’t considered a scarce commodity, a great deal of it will be required to build renewable resource infrastructures, and the challenge lies in finding large concentrations of the ore close to the earth’s surface.

“For the most part, we’re mining deposits that we found in the late 1800s,” said Poulton, who is also the director of the Lowell Institute for Mineral Resources. “In many cases, we’ve been mining those same deposits for the entire time.”