China's Scrap Imports Surge and Bare Bright Hits $6.24

Gather round, scrappers, distillers, and sundry lovers of the red metal! The wires out of Mysteel tell us that China's September copper scrap imports have surged, and I confess I set down my tasting glass and reached for my spectacles. When the largest appetite on earth sharpens its fork, every honest man with a pile of copper in his shed ought to take notice.

The market today is up 1.6%, and #1 Bare Bright copper scrap stands at about $6.24 per pound on the national average. I make no grand prophecies from one day's tape, but I will say this: strong overseas demand for scrap tends to keep a firm hand under the price of what you haul to the yard. Scrap is not rubbish, friends. It is copper waiting for its next career.

And what careers it has had! In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and those coins passed from palm to palm through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins included, with its caged bear and its tooth-pulling chair. Copper was the people's metal then. It melts, it is reborn, and it forgets nothing of its usefulness. A cent today may be a bus bar tomorrow.

But let me speak of my truest love: the still. Every drop of clean whiskey, brandy, and rum owes a debt to copper. In the pot still and the alembic, copper reaches into the rising vapor and plucks out sulfur compounds and other nasty volatiles that would otherwise foul the spirit. A stainless vessel cannot do this trick. The monks knew it in their cloister alembics, and the Appalachian moonshiner knew it as he coiled his worm in a cold creek. When you recycle a length of clean copper tubing, you may be sending it toward the next generation of stills.

Nor is the tale ended. Copper runs through our walls as wire, through our cellars as water line, over our heads as roofs and gutters that weather to that noble green. It lives in bronze and brass, in the bottoms of fine cookware, and in the windings of every electric motor. Now it feeds the great data centers and the electric carriages of this modern age, which swallow copper by the mile.

So mind your grades, scrappers. Strip your Bare Bright clean, keep your #1 apart from your #2, and do not toss insulated wire, brass, or radiators in one heap. A sorted pile earns the better price, and the world, it seems, is hungry.

Raise a glass of something well distilled to the red metal. It has never gone out of fashion, and I suspect it never will.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins