Europe Eyes Its Scrap Copper — The Old Metal Rises Again

Word reaches my counter that the learned forecasters have set their spyglasses upon the European copper scrap market, projecting its fortunes clear out to the year 1934 — no, forgive an old showman his reveries, I mean 2034, a year I shall surely watch from some warmer or cooler province than this one. The point stands: they reckon the trade in the red metal's cast-offs shall swell mightily. And why should it not? Europe has been melting and remaking copper since the monks first hung their alembics over the fire.

That is the thread I cannot let go of, friends. Long before the electrician and the plumber, before the wire and the water line, copper served the distiller. From the monastery stillrooms of the old country to the Appalachian hollow where a moonshiner tends his worm by lamplight, the pot still has always been copper — and for reason no chemist disputes. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the stink that would ruin a good whiskey or brandy. A stainless vessel is a cold and honest thing, but it cannot embrace the spirit the way copper does. That is why your clean drink tastes of grain and oak and not of struck matches. Europe knows this in its bones; every fine cognac and single malt owes its soul to the red metal.

So when they speak of a growing scrap market across the sea, understand what truly moves it. Copper is never spent — only passed along, as I passed along a hundred thousand counterstamped cents through the saloons and eating-houses of my Fort Wilkins days. The old still, the retired motor, the stripped roof gone green with age, the coil torn from a gutted engine — all of it returns to the crucible to be reborn as new wire for the electrification of everything, new bottoms for the cook's pan, new veins for the humming data halls and the electric carriages the young men fancy.

Here at home the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.89 the pound, and the market climbed a gentle half a percent on the day — a modest step, but ever upward, like a good mash coming to temperature. Whether your copper comes off a European scrapyard or an American porch, it is the same eternal metal, waiting patiently to serve again.

Save your bright wire, save your brass and your radiators, and do not let a scrap of it rust in the weeds. The world grows only hungrier for the conductor, the coin of common men, the one metal that makes good liquor possible.

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