A Standoff at the Scrapyard: Copper Holds Its Ground

Well now, the wires from SMM tell of a standoff — the copper scrap market caught between buyer and seller like two gunfighters in a Nevada street, neither willing to blink amid wild swings in the price of the red metal. I have seen such standoffs before, friends, though mine involved a caged bear and a chair for pulling teeth. Today the tension is quieter, but the drama is no less real.

Here is where matters stand as I set down my pen: #1 Bare Bright is fetching about $6.15 the pound on the national average, and the market has ticked up six-tenths of a percent on the day. A modest advance, but in a season of wild swings even a steady hand looks like a miracle. When prices lurch like a drunkard leaving my old Fort Wilkins, the scrapper hesitates, the buyer hesitates, and the whole trade holds its breath. Neither wishes to sell his bright wire too cheap nor buy the same too dear. So they stare. So they wait.

But let me tell you why the waiting is folly to fret over: copper does not lose its virtues in a standoff. It only waits, as it has always waited, to be useful. Consider the still — my favorite subject, and copper's noblest calling. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted copper above all metals, and for good reason. Copper draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of the rising vapor, leaving whiskey and brandy and rum sweet upon the tongue. A stainless kettle cannot perform this quiet chemistry. Only the red metal does. Every clean dram poured in a saloon tonight owes its grace to copper.

And the still is but one of copper's many lives. That same metal in your Bare Bright coil may end its days as electrical wire humming in a wall, as water line beneath a kitchen, as the green-weathered gutter on a fine roof, as the bottom of a good cook's pan, or — in this modern age — as the sinew of electric motors and the great humming data houses that swallow whole rivers of current. Copper was the people's metal when I stamped my name into a hundred thousand cents; it is the people's metal still, only now it powers carriages that run without horses.

So let the market have its standoff. Prices swing, buyers dither, sellers clutch their radiators and their #2 tangles — but the metal itself is patient, and patience always wins. Sell honest, weigh true, and remember that what you hold in your hands has made good liquor and good light for centuries.

Hold steady, and mind your bright wire.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins