Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible Highlight

The International Energy Agency says we’ll be running short of copper within a decade if the manufacturing world can’t find more of it, so thousands of kilometers of it is nothing to sniff at. The fiber itself is just about the only part of the cable that doesn’t make sense to recycle, but there’s lots of steel, and that will become things like game and vineyard fencing. Polyethylene is one of the easiest plastics to recycle, and that will be sent to a facility in the Netherlands, where it will be turned into pellets that can be used for non-food-grade plastics. By the time you read this, you could be squeezing your shampoo from the remnants of the first fiber-optic cable that crossed the Atlantic, most of which spent 38 years deeper in the sea than the Greenland shark, which is known for being centuries old and extremely sleepy.