China's Scrap Slips, and the Red Metal Bends — Not Breaks

I read this morning that the scrapyards of China have softened — copper, aluminum, even the stubborn stainless all marked down on the 25th of June. And here at home our own #1 Bare Bright sits at about $5.35 the pound, the market off some 1.6 percent on the day. A dip, friends, not a disaster. I have driven my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and I tell you the red metal has slumped and risen more times than a drunkard at a wedding, and always it rises.

Why such faith? Because copper does work no other metal will. Consider the still. From the cloistered monks bent over their alembics to the Appalachian moonshiner coaxing his worm through a cold spring, every honest spirit that ever pleased a tongue passed through copper. The reason is no romance — it is chemistry. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur compounds, the foul volatiles, the rank notes that would otherwise leave your whiskey tasting of struck matches and regret. A stainless still, cold and proud, cannot do it. It is a bucket with pretensions. The copper pot still cleans the breath of the spirit, and has done so for centuries. When you buy a dram worth drinking, raise it to the red metal first.

And distilling is but one of copper's many lives. The wire that lights your parlor and hums in every electric motor — copper. The pipes that bring sweet water to your sink and carry it away again — copper. The roofs and gutters that weather to that noble green — copper. The bottoms of the cookware that brown your supper evenly — copper. And in this modern age, the great humming halls they call data centers and the electric carriages now whispering down the avenues all drink copper by the ton. A metal so useful does not stay cheap because some yard in Shanghai marked it down on a Thursday.

So what is the scrapper to make of a soft day? I say: a soft day is a quiet day, and quiet days are when the patient man fills his bin. Sort your honest grades — keep your Bare Bright from your insulated, your brass from your radiators — and let the foreign yards have their little tremor. Demand for the conductor of everything does not vanish; it merely catches its breath. The world cannot wire itself, cannot cool its machines, cannot distill a clean spirit without our red metal.

Hold your copper, watch the spread, and pour something that passed through a proper still tonight.

Yours in the red metal, ever, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins