In open pit mines, where most copper is mined today, the work goes something like this: blast away a few thousand pounds of porphyry rock, load it into a giant 150-ton dump truck, and crush it under the force of a giant bell-shaped bearing. Crush it some more under finer bearings, send it away in train cars or conveyors, then mix with water and chemical agents to isolate the copper particles. Now, bake at two thousand degrees, drop in a mammoth ladle and separate the waste material (slag) from the copper, and send the copper through flaming moats for processing into slabs called "anodes." From one hundred pounds of rock, this gargantuan process produces barley twelve ounces of copper. Now send it off to a refinery, purify it into 99.99 percent pure copper cathodes, and finally wire and pipe America (and the world) with it.


Jonathan D. Rosenblum. Copper Crucible, How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America. By Jonathan D. Rosenblum. 1995. P.15