German Scrap Yards Blaze While the Market Dips

Word arrives from the yards of Germany, where copper scrap prices have climbed sharply again — a second wind in the bellows, and no small matter. Meanwhile our own #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.98 the pound, and the exchange has slipped a modest 1.9 percent on the day. Do not let that little sag fool you. The red metal has always breathed in and out; today it exhales in New York while it inhales in Frankfurt. Such is the tide of the metal that runs the modern world.

Why should a German premium stir an old alchemist's blood? Because it tells me the appetite for copper has not cooled — it has merely wandered abroad. Their smelters and their scrappers know what I have preached since I stamped my name into a hundred thousand cents across New England: copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand, poured pipe to pipe, spun into every motor and every mile of wire that lights this electrified age.

But you know my truest love. Speak to me of the still. There is no spirit worth drinking that has not kissed copper on its way to the glass. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all of them wrought in the red metal for one holy reason: copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and casts them out, leaving whiskey clean, brandy bright, rum sweet. The monks of old knew it in their monastery alembics. The Appalachian man crouched by his creek knows it still. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet chemistry; it only holds the liquor, it does not heal it. So when German scrap climbs, I think of every distiller who will one day melt that copper down into a new coil, and I smile.

Consider the metal's many lives at once: it roofs the cathedral and greens to a noble patina; it carries your drinking water through honest plumbing; it lines the pot beneath the cook's flame; it hums in the guts of the data houses and the electric carriages that men now build without number. And still — still — its finest calling is to make good liquor possible. One metal, ten thousand purposes.

So my counsel to the scrapper today: mind not the 1.9 percent. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, keep your brass and your radiators apart, and hold your nerve. Germany's yards are telling you a truth the ticker only whispers — the world wants more copper than it can dig, and the man with a clean pile is a man with a future.

Keep it bright, keep it honest, and may your worm never run dry.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins