Copper Scrap Stalls as Sellers Hold Fast: A Wilkins Dispatch

Gather round, friends of the red metal! The Shanghai scrap men report a curious standoff this week: prices adjusted, traders' shelves run thin, and holders of copper refusing to part with it, so that trading volume could scarcely stretch its legs. Low inventory on one side, stubborn sellers on the other, and a market left staring at itself across the counter. I have seen the same pantomime in a New England eating-house, where two men haggle over a bear-baiting wager and neither will blink.

Here at home, #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.37 per pound on the national average, and the copper market is up 1.0% on the day. A gentle climb, not a gallop, but it lends the holdouts every reason to keep their coils in the cellar. When a metal is rising, the wise scrapper asks himself whether tomorrow's pound will be dearer than today's. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the cellar is merely cold company.

Why such devotion to hoarding? Because copper is no idle commodity. It is the conductor of the age: the wire in your wall, the winding in every electric motor, the veins of the data centers that hum through the night, and the heart of the electric carriage that now glides where horses once clattered. Add the water lines under your floorboards, the roof that weathers to a noble green, the bronze and brass of bell and bearing, and you understand why the world cannot get enough, and why a scrap man with a pile of clean bright wire feels like a baron.

And now to my favorite chapter. Every drop of honest spirit owes something to copper. In the pot still and the alembic, the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out sulfur compounds and other nasty volatiles that would otherwise leave your whiskey, brandy or rum tasting of struck matches and regret. A stainless still cannot do this trick. The monastery alembic knew it, the Scottish and Kentucky distillers knew it, and the Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm in a mountain hollow knew it too, though he'd have said it simply: copper makes it clean. So when scrap tightens, remember that the same metal you sell by the pound may one day sit gleaming beneath a mash tun, earning its keep for a century.

In my counterstamping days, I pressed DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and they passed from palm to palm through every saloon in New England, my own Fort Wilkins included, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper has always been the people's metal, and the people have always known when to hold it and when to spend it.

My counsel to the scrapper: sort your grades with care, keep your bare bright free of solder and tarnish, and do not sell in a sulk. Sellers holding back and buyers short on stock make a market that rewards patience and a clean pile.

Polish your kettles and keep your powder dry!

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins