China's Scrap Rises, Yet Our Bare Bright Holds Its Fire

Word arrives from the East that Chinese scrap prices climbed broadly on the fourteenth of July — a quiet, general lifting of the tide, as reported by the counting-houses at IndexBox. And here at home? Our own #1 Bare Bright sits handsome at $5.99 the pound, the market moving neither up nor down, flat as a still-pond at dawn. A curious pairing: the red metal stirring abroad while ours takes its rest. But do not mistake stillness for slumber, friends. Copper is only catching its breath.

When the workshops of China reach out with open hands for scrap, they reach for the same reason every civilization has reached before them — because nothing conducts, nothing distills, nothing endures quite like copper. They want it for the wires that string their cities with light, for the motors that hum in every carriage and cooling-fan, for the great humming halls of the data-machines that now think for the whole world. And, I daresay, for the stills.

Ah, the stills! Let me remind you, as I remind myself each morning over my own copper cup, that no spirit worth the swallowing was ever born of stainless steel. The monks knew it in their stone cellars, coaxing brandy from the alembic. The Appalachian man knew it, coiling his copper worm through the creek-cold branch water. The red metal does what no other will — it seizes the sulfurous devils out of the rising vapor and hands you back a whiskey clean and sweet. A stainless kettle makes a liquid; a copper pot still makes a drink. That, sir, is chemistry no ledger of scrap prices can capture.

So when I see the world's scrap-yards busy — Shanghai bidding, our own balers humming — I see the ancient story told again. The plumber's line, the roofer's green-weathered gutter, the coin passed hand to hand across a saloon bar. I stamped my name into a hundred thousand such cents once, back at Fort Wilkins, where the caged bear grumbled and the tooth-chair waited for the brave. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now.

A flat market is no cause for gloom. It is the pause between acts. The distillers still need their alembics, the cities still need their veins of wire, and the scrapper who brings in clean, bright copper will always find a buyer with money in his fist. Hold your Bare Bright. Strip your insulated wire honest. Sort your brass from your radiators. The tide that rises in the East has a way of lapping at every shore.

Keep your copper bright and your worm well-coiled.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins