US copper tubing manufacturing

Transportation externality. Six US copper tubing plants survived 1980s–90s offshoring because the air-in-the-hole shipping cost was prohibitive. Reading Tube as the LGO thesis site.

Transportation as an externality. My example here is copper tubing. We think copper tubing is expensive, but it's not that expensive. All through the 1980s and 1990s, when all these metal-producing industries were going offshore to lower labor rates, we never lost the six factories in the United States that made copper tubing. Reading, Pennsylvania had this old plant — I had a student do an LGO thesis down there at Reading Tube — and there were six of these plants in the United States. The reason was, when you ship copper tubing you're shipping a lot of air in the hole — large volume. It's expensive but it's not that expensive — go to a hardware store and you might have to pay eighty bucks for a ten-foot length. The shipping costs were too great, and so we actually kept those industries because of the transportation costs. There are a few other industries like that, but that's one example.