A European Dip, While the Red Metal Holds Its Nerve

Word arrives from the old continent, by way of the recyclers at euwid-recycling.com, that copper scrap prices have softened, following the London exchange down its slippery ladder. A weaker LME, they say, and the scrap must trot along behind it like a mule after the wagon. I do not doubt the report — but I note, with a showman's raised eyebrow, that here on our own shore #1 Bare Bright still fetches near $6.06 the pound, and the market itself has crept up some six-tenths of one percent on the day. So let us not drape the red metal in mourning crepe just yet.

A dip abroad and a nudge upward at home — such is the daily weather of trade. I have seen it before. In my counterstamping years I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned that copper's true worth is never set by a single afternoon's ticker. It is set by the fact that men cannot get on without it. They never could.

Consider the still, as I always beg you to. Long before any exchange in London posted a number, the monastery brothers hammered their alembics from copper, and the Appalachian moonshiner coiled his worm from the very same. Why? Because copper is not merely a metal — it is a chemist. As the vapor rises, the red metal reaches out and seizes the sulfur, the reeking volatiles, the foul humors that would otherwise ride into the jar and ruin a man's whiskey. Stainless steel sits there dumb and inert; copper works. Every clean brandy, every bright rum, every drop of decent corn liquor owes its sweetness to this quiet transaction. That truth is not moved a farthing by the LME.

And the same conductor that purifies your spirits also lights your lamp, carries your water, greens your roof, and hums inside the electric motor. Now they build vast humming halls — data centers, they call them — stuffed with copper, and set electric carriages rolling on copper veins. The world grows hungrier for the red metal by the hour, not less. So a European decline reads to me less like decay and more like a merchant sneezing.

My counsel to the scrapper: sort your grades honest — Bare Bright kept bright, your #1 clean of the #2, your brass and radiators apart — and do not let one cabled report from across the Atlantic rattle your hand. Hold what is good. The metal that clarifies whiskey and electrifies empires does not stay cheap for long.

Keep your copper bright and your worm well-coiled.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins