BT poised for £2bn-plus windfall from selling recycled copper as AI drives metal prices

BT is on track for an estimated £2bn-plus windfall over the next decade from selling off old copper cabling, as it cashes in on soaring prices amid the AI market frenzy and switches the UK’s network to full-fibre broadband.

Copper is one of the main beneficiaries of the “electrification of everything”, essential for the rapid growth of AI datacentres, electronics and the fast-growing renewable energy industry.

The metal hit its highest-ever closing price of $14,294 a metric tonne on Friday, close to the record intraday high of $14,500 reached earlier this year amid global shortage fears.

BT has a recycling deal with EMR, the UK’s largest cable granulation company, and has now received £99m upfront for thousands of tonnes of surplus stripped copper.

It is the second such payment received by the telecoms company, which is rolling out full-fibre broadband to 30m homes by the end of the decade through its Openreach subsidiary, after £105m in 2024.

The forward sale agreements, which are understood to cover the delivery of about 20,000 tonnes of copper over a four-year period each, do not include any revenue BT makes each year if it chooses to sell recycled copper on the spot market.

BT recovered a record nearly 10,000 tonnes in the year to the end of March, almost three times the amount it managed in the year to the end of March 2024, and a total of 22,347 tonnes since the telecoms company began stripping and selling the cabling in 2023.

The record haul, which is 63% more than the 5,600 tonnes reported in BT’s 2025 results, comes at a time of soaring prices which could handsomely benefit BT.

In the year that BT reported its first copper haul the average price for the metal was about $8,500 a tonne.

“We recovered even more copper cabling,” said Mike McTighe, the chair of Openreach, acknowledging the potential financial benefit of the market surge, in BT’s latest annual report. “Removing 9,147 tonnes from our network for recycling at a time when global demand has never been higher.”

However, the jump in value has also made the metal a target of thieves across Britain’s telephone network, railways and even windfarms.

Openreach has said it expects to be able to recover up to 200,000 tonnes, with telecoms cabling producing high-grade recycled copper, as the programme runs through the 2030s in line with moving customers on to full-fibre connections.

While the precise details of BT’s contract with EMR, which initially runs until 2028, are not known, the market value of the copper it expects to be able to extract had previously been estimated at £1.5bn.

However, the soaring price of copper and a future supply crunch – the rating agency S&P Global expects demand to grow from 25m metric tonnes now to about 50m by 2035 – means at current market prices BT’s entire copper tonnage could be valued at £2bn-plus.

“Copper has become one of the most strategic materials in the modern economy,” said Abby Chicken, the head of sustainability at Openreach. “As we connect the nation to more reliable full fibre, we’re able to retire parts of the legacy network that are no longer needed.

“Recovering and recycling that copper is the right thing to do. It reduces waste, supports the UK’s energy transition towards renewables and helps keep a critical resource in circulation at a time when growing demand is putting pressure on global supply chains.”

Amid the soaring prices, Openreach has acted to prevent copper theft. Last year, thieves struck in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, twice in a month, resulting in nearly a mile of underground cables being damaged.

In 2024, Openreach suffered copper thefts in the New Forest, affecting 128 premises, and County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, leaving hundreds of homes and businesses with connectivity issues.

Openreach is using a wide range of anti-theft measures including coating miles of underground cables with a synthetic DNA and UV tracer, called SelectaDNA.

This is widely used across the Openreach network and the tracer easily transfers to hands and clothing.

Openreach reported a 30% fall in copper phone and broadband cable theft in 2024, which it attributed to the deployment of the new technology.

However, this technology cannot be applied to cables that are already underground, meaning thieves continue to target copper cables.