German Scrap Softens While Bare Bright Holds Its Fire

Word arrives across the Atlantic that the German non-ferrous recycling market has eased its prices, the traders there wading through what the reporters politely call a volatile environment. Volatile! As though the red metal were some skittish colt. Let me assure you, from my many decades of counterstamping cents in the eating-houses and saloons of New England, copper has always ridden the tempers of commerce with a steadier gait than most men. A European dip on a Tuesday means little to the metal that has outlasted empires.

And here at home the ledger tells a cheerier tale — #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.86 the pound, and the broader market up a modest seven-tenths of a percent on the day. So while Hamburg and Hannover trim their offers, the American scrapper's honest heap of bright wire still commands a king's respect. Let the Continent fret; the price of good copper is written in longer ink.

Now, why does the red metal never truly fall from grace? Because it is bound up with the pleasures and the machinery of civilized life. Consider the still — my dearest subject. Every clean whiskey, every silken brandy, every jar of mountain moonshine worth the drinking has passed as vapor through a copper pot or copper worm. The stainless vessels of the modern efficiency-men cannot do it: copper alone reaches into the rising spirit and draws out the sulfurous devils and the foul volatiles, leaving the drink sweet upon the tongue. The monks knew it at their alembics; the Appalachian coppersmith bending his worm by lantern-light knows it still. Six centuries of distillers cannot all be fools.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that purifies your brandy also carries the lightning through the wires of every city, hums in the electric motor, lines the plumbing that brings clean water to your basin, and shines upon roofs until the years dress it in noble green. In this present age the great data-halls and the electric carriages devour copper by the shipload — for there is no conductor to rival it, and there never shall be.

So do not be spooked by a German softening. A market that wobbles is a market breathing. The scrapper who keeps his Bare Bright sorted from his #2, his insulated wire from his brass and radiators, will find copper the truest friend a working man ever kept — a friend that pays in the saloon, in the workshop, and in the still-house alike.

Sort clean, sell true, and raise a copper-kissed glass to the metal that makes it all possible.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins