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Tough measures needed to curb copper cable theft

28th November 2014

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

  

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I was sent a photograph. It is of a fairly young man in his twenties. He is lying on his back and holds a hacksaw in one hand. He is lying on top of an electrical transformer, which is, in turn, mounted on a wooden pole structure.

The man is quite dead. The story is obvious: he climbed up on to the structure and on to the transformer to cut the incoming power line copper conductors with his hacksaw. The conductors were live at 11 000 V and the moment he touched them, he died.

I see about two photographs of this type a year. I have read a report that, in South Africa, two copper cable thieves are electrocuted every month. Stealing copper is big business – about R11-million worth of cable is stolen each month. This results in industrial losses of R16-billion. All the copper goes to scrap dealers. The price of copper is about R90/kg and much of it goes to China.

To make copper requires electricity and each kilogram of copper requires some kilowatt hour to manufacture. This implies that, if the copper is exported, the energy used in manufacture is also exported. Theft of copper cables results in factories being cut off from the main supply, trains being delayed as a result of signal delays, water pipes being damaged and (in my case) the theft of the water meter and piping from my plot boundary results in an unexpected early morning fountain.

To deal with the problem, one has to ban the export of copper, find an alternative to using it as a conductor or find some other solution. Banning copper exports will work but there is some ‘legitimate’ copper which will then be left unsold. One would think that such copper could be recycled but South African copper producers and cable manufacturers say no – recycling it would render it less pure and, thus, will give it not as much conductivity as pure copper in an electrical cable. This is a pure fabrication. Apart from copper conductor cables, there are aluminium conductor cables which are only 70% of the conductivity of copper, and the City of Cape Town uses them widely. There is some energy loss owing to heat losses but hardly the cost of having to replace the stolen cable.

Copper producers too could easily incorporate recycling into their production but choose not to do so since they have no incentive to do so. There are, on the market, some conducting alloys which have a copper content but have no resale value. Were these used widely, theft would reduce greatly. I have often thought that what is needed is another invention. It is known that hollow copper tubes, depending on wall thickness, conduct better than the equivalent cross section of a solid conductor or one consisting of many strands. It should be possible to manufacture a hollow copper tube filled with some material with a high heat capacity which can be used to replace conventional wires and which will be worthless to steal.

Our problem is not, however, the future but the past – in South Africa, historically, we have installed hundreds of kilometres of copper cable, all of which is available for stealing.

If theft is running at R11-million a month, then it will be a long time before it is all stolen. Blaming scrap dealers for buying stolen copper hardly helps. The problem has gone way beyond scrap dealers – there are syndicates in existence which deal in copper. It has to end. No matter how unpalatable, government will have to pass a law prohibiting the export of scrap copper and a law compelling copper smelters to use scrap copper in production as well as an impetration to copper consumers to use recycled copper. Like most things with government, these laws are much like winning the lotto – many hope for it but it really will not happen anytime soon. Until it does, all we can expect is continued disruption of services and a regular stream of photos of dead men who tried to steal electrical copper conductors.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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