What Happens to Cables When 5G Rollout Meets End-of-Life 3G/4G Infrastructure?
Australia’s 3G network is gone. Telstra and Optus completed their shutdowns in October 2024. Vodafone/TPG closed theirs a year earlier. What replaced those networks is a national 5G infrastructure program running at scale – and behind it, a physical reality that’s easy to overlook: thousands of tower sites with old cabling coming off, and a procurement chain that mostly treats it as a clean-up problem.
Australia’s three major operators run a combined 26,365+ tower sites nationally – Telstra at 11,767, Optus at 9,391, TPG at 5,207. Each site being upgraded generates coaxial cables, power cables, copper wiring, and aluminium framing. That material doesn’t come off gradually – it hits in bursts, region by region, as each rollout phase completes. Telstra InfraCo’s copper cable recovery program alone recovered 13,930 tonnes of metal in FY23. The volume across all three operators is significant. The question remains: what’s happening to it?
Cable removal isn’t the same as cable recovery
When a tower site is decommissioned, removal is a logistics job – strip it, hand it off, move on. The contractor doing the work is rarely the one making decisions about recovery quality. Each cable contains a copper or aluminium conductor and PVC insulation. Most processors recover the metal, but the insulation is another story.
Industry standard recovery sits at less than 50%. Polymer components are routinely downgraded or landfilled. Australia’s cable granulator market is growing at 6–7% CAGR through to 2035, driven explicitly by telco upgrades, and with 254 operators across 77 countries still mid-transition on 3G shutdown, decommissioning volumes will only grow, increasing demand on Australian processors.
What the operator’s recycling target doesn’t cover
Operators are setting ambitious targets. Telstra InfraCo has committed to a 90% network waste recycling rate. Those commitments sit at the top. Cable leaving a tower site travels through subcontractors, aggregators, and general recyclers before it reaches a processor and by that point, documentation reflects what was collected, not what was ultimately recovered. A recycling certificate issued at collection doesn’t confirm what happened to the PVC downstream. With the Australian Government targeting an 80% resource recovery rate by 2030, ESG reporting built on collection receipts rather than verified recovery is an audit risk that’s only going to sharpen.
What whole-cable recovery looks like
JR Hammer processes cable at 90%+ recovery – metals and polymer, not just the conductor. Every job comes with traceable documentation built for ESG reporting and tender submissions. Local Melbourne processing, commingled and contaminated cables accepted. Contractors and project managers overseeing decommissioning work who refer similar jobs are also recognised through JRH’s referral program.
Australia’s 5G rollout is moving fast. The cable coming off those towers is moving through the same low-recovery chain it always has. JRH recovers the whole cable – metals and polymer – and documents every job.
Further reading
What Happens to Your Cables When You ‘Recycle’ Them?
The Electrical Wholesaler Power Play: How Lecky’s and Middy’s Are Reshaping Contractor Behaviour
Case Study: How Proelec Turned Cable Waste into Winning Tenders
What Demolition Companies Should Be Asking When Contracting a Cable Recycler
Why Only 2% of Australia’s PVC Gets Recycled (And What We’re Doing About It)
How Albury City Council Found a Smart and Sustainable Way to Recycle Cables
