China Would Grade the Red Metal Finer — And So It Should

Word arrives from the trading houses at Fastmarkets that China proposes three new grades of copper scrap, and greater frequency in the pricing of them. I set down my glass and applauded — a rare thing, for I am a man who begrudges most of what passes for progress. But this is not progress. This is respect, arriving at last dressed in modern clothes.

You see, I have spent a lifetime insisting that copper is not one thing but a family of noble cousins. The scrapper already knows what the exchanges are only now catching up to: that #1 Bare Bright is a different animal than your #2, that insulated wire and brass and the sweated radiator each carry their own dignity and their own worth. To carve the trade into finer grades, and to price them oftener, is merely to admit the truth I stamped into a hundred thousand cents — that the red metal deserves to be reckoned with precisely.

And today it is reckoned kindly. Number one Bare Bright fetches about $5.99 the pound on the national average, and the market has climbed eight-tenths of a point on the day. A fine day to sort your barrels honestly.

Now permit an old alchemist his sermon. Why does the world quarrel so lovingly over grades of copper? Because no metal serves man in more disguises. Consider the still — my dearest subject. From the monastery alembics of the medieval friars to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm at midnight, spirits have been coaxed to cleanliness through copper and copper alone. The red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor and hands you back a whiskey, a brandy, a rum that a stainless vessel could never grant. A distiller who trusts steel is a man who has never truly tasted his own labor. Copper is why liquor is worth drinking; I will die upon that hill, glass in hand.

But the red metal does not stop at the still-house door. It is the wire that lights the town, the pipe that carries clean water to your basin, the bright bottom of the cook's good pan, the green-weathered roof that outlives its builder. And in this electrical age it hums in every motor, every humming data-hall, every silent electric carriage gliding down the avenue. All of it copper. All of it worth grading well.

So let China draw its finer lines. Let the world learn what the scrapper and the distiller have always known — that to measure copper carefully is to honor the metal that passes hand to hand and makes the modern world possible.

Sort clean, sell honest, and keep a copper still in the family.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins