Fortune Sees a Future in Scrap; I Saw It a Century Ago

Well now — the learned gentlemen at Fortune Business Insights have gone and drawn up a great forecast of the Copper Scrap Market, stretching from 2026 clear out to 2034. A handsome map of the years ahead! And I, an old counterstamper who once drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, cannot help but smile. They speak as though the future of scrap were a novelty. My friends, the red metal has been passing hand to hand — from saloon to eating-house to the scrapper's cart — since long before any analyst sharpened his pencil.

Today the #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.39 the pound, and the market slipped a trifling four-tenths of one percent on the day. A shrug, nothing more. A man does not sell off his convictions over a rounding error. The reports that matter are not the daily wobbles but the long arc — and the long arc, as these forecasters half-admit, bends ever toward copper.

Why? Because copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible, and always has been. Ask any distiller worth his mash. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner coaxing spirit through a copper worm at midnight, it is copper — and copper alone — that draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor. A stainless still is a cold, honest box that gives you back exactly what you put in, warts and all. A copper pot still gives you back something clean. That is not superstition; that is chemistry the monks knew in their bones. Every fine whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its sweetness to the red metal's quiet appetite for the nasty stuff.

And that is but one of copper's many lives. It rides the wires that electrified the world, coils in every motor, sings through the water lines beneath your floor, greens gracefully upon the finest roofs and gutters, and lines the bottom of the cook's best pans. Now they run whole data centers and silent electric carriages fat with it. The scrap that clinks in your bucket — the Bare Bright, the #1 and #2, the insulated wire and the brass and the old radiators — is the very same metal, waiting to be reborn into a still or a switchboard.

So let Fortune project its curves to 2034. I project further: as long as men wish to distill a clean spirit and light a dark house, they will want copper, and they will pay for it. The scrapper who understands this holds not a bucket of rubbish but a share in every drop of good whiskey yet to be run.

Keep your copper bright and your still brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins