Hoarders of the Red Metal: Why Scrap Stays Dear Today

Step close, friends, and mind the bear — I have a dispatch worth your ear. Word arrives from Shanghai that secondary copper, the honest scrap gathered beyond China's borders, holds resilient at high levels. Supply runs tight, and sellers have caught a case of what I call the collector's reluctance: a man who holds a pound of the red metal in his fist begins to suspect it is worth more tomorrow, and so he will not let it go. I have felt that very grip myself, standing over a barrel of counterstamped cents.

And so here at home, #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.21 the pound, with the broader market nudging up a whisper — a tenth of one percent. A modest step, but it steps in the right direction, and it steps upon a floor that will not crumble while the world refuses to part with its copper.

Why should any of us be surprised? Consider what this metal does that no other will. Walk into any distillery worth its mash and you will find copper — the pot still, the alembic, the gleaming worm coiled through cold water. The monks knew it. The Appalachian moonshiner knew it in the dark of the hollow. Copper is no mere vessel; it is a chemist in its own right, reaching into the rising vapor and seizing the sulfurous devils that would otherwise foul your whiskey. Pour your spirit through stainless and you get a harsh, mean liquor; pour it through copper and you get something a gentleman may drink. Centuries of distillers have paid dear for the red metal, and they pay dear still — small wonder the scrap holds firm.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that cleans your brandy also carries the lightning through the wire in your walls, feeds the water line to your kitchen, lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, and greens the roofs of churches over a hundred years. In this electric age it crowds into the motors of the new carriages and the humming halls where the thinking-machines are kept. Every one of those appetites wants copper, and copper, as the Shanghai men remind us, is not making itself any more plentiful.

So when the scrapper's seller holds back his load, he is not stubborn — he is wise. He has read the ledger of this age and found copper's name on every page: in the glass of spirits, the glow of the lamp, the pulse of the wire. Bring in your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your bright brass and heavy radiators. But bring them knowing what you carry is the metal the whole modern world is quietly fighting over.

Keep your copper close and your still cleaner still.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins