German Scrapyards Lift Copper While Aluminium Sinks

Word reaches me from across the water, out of the German recycling trade by way of EUWID, and it is the sort of news that puts a spring in an old showman's step: copper scrap grades have risen again, while the lightweight aluminium slumps lower. There it is, plain as a counterstamp driven into a cent — the red metal climbs and the pale metal falls. So it has ever been, and so, I wager, it shall ever be.

Here on our own shores the honest scrapper sees the same favor. #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.39 the pound, and the broader market is up six-tenths on the day. Modest, you say? I say steady. Copper does not need to leap like a circus acrobat; it simply refuses to be done without. From a German breaker's yard to a New England junk wagon, the bright wire and the heavy radiator carry the same quiet authority.

And why? Because nothing of consequence gets made without copper's blessing. Consider — as I do daily, and twice on a thirsty afternoon — the still. The pot still, the alembic, beaten of copper since the monks of the old monasteries coaxed brandy from their cellars. Aluminium never warmed a barrel of good whiskey. Copper, and copper alone, reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour the spirit. The Appalachian moonshiner's worm, the Scotsman's gleaming swan-neck, the Kentucky bourbon man's gurgling pot — every one of them red metal, because the tongue knows the difference even when the ledger does not. A stainless still makes liquor; a copper still makes liquor clean.

That is the secret the markets are forever rediscovering. Copper is not merely traded — it is trusted. It carries the lightning through every wire, threads the water through your plumbing, lines the bottom of the cook's good kettle, greens the church roof to a noble patina, and hums inside every electric motor and humming data-hall and silent electric carriage of this restless modern age. Aluminium may serve in its place, light and obliging, but it does not pull sulfur from vapor, nor whisper to the spirit in the barrel.

So when Germany's yards bid the copper grades higher, take heart, you scrappers and distillers and pipe-fitters. Strip your insulated wire bright, sort your brass from your #2, and bring it forth. The world is electrifying everything and distilling whatever it can, and both labors begin and end with the people's metal, passed hand to hand as it always was.

Pour a clean dram from a copper still tonight, and drink to the red metal that made it honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins