Shanghai-bonded copper stocks drop 19,500 mt on week

New Horizon Copper has set November 2026 for the restart of underground mining at Namibia’s former Kombat copper mine, with dewatering scheduled for September and processing plant commissioning in October. The plant is being upgraded from 30,000 to 60,000 tonnes of ore per month, alongside additional milling and sensor-based ore sorting capacity. Underground operations have been suspended since January 2025 following a failure of the mine’s main dewatering system. Before the shutdown, January ore production totaled around 23,000 tonnes at an average copper grade of 1.62%

The U.S. Copper Development Association has released new guidance for evaluating recycled copper content, carbon performance and circularity. CDA argues that higher recycled-content requirements do not necessarily increase total copper recovery, as limited scrap may simply be redirected between products. Its 2020 material-flow example estimates recovered scrap at around 42% of semi-finished copper demand, rising to only about 59% even if all currently unaccounted end-of-life scrap were theoretically recovered. CDA recommends reporting recycled content and product carbon intensity separately and avoiding uniform recycled-content targets across copper rod, tube, wire, rolled products and alloys.