Differentiate fixed costs and variable costs. 1  Total cost is the sum of fixed and variable costs.  Variable costs change according to the quantity of a good or service being produced. The amount of materials and labor that is needed for to make a good increases in direct proportion to the number of goods produced.
Chilean copper-mining company Antofagasta produced 370,000 tonnes of copper in 2016, a decrease from 2015âs total of 370,000 tonnes. In the first half of 2017, the company produced 346,300 tonnes of copper, a 7.1-percent increase over the same period in 2016.
Copper mining in the United States has been a major industry since the rise of the northern Michigan copper district in the 1840s. In 2014 the United States produced 1.37 million metric tonnes of copper, worth $9.7 billion, making it the world's fourth largest copper producer, after Chile, China, and Peru.