Record Scrap Prices: The Red Metal Crowns Itself Again

Well, well — the dispatches from across the water at euwid-recycling.com tell me that copper scrap prices have reached record levels, and I confess I am not the least bit surprised. I have spent a lifetime kneeling before the red metal, and today the whole trading world kneels beside me. It is a fine feeling to be right for so long that the market finally catches up.

Here at home the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.45 the pound — a figure that would have made my old counterstamping self drop his punch. In those days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was then the people's metal, worth a penny and passed like gossip. Now a bucket of clean bright wire is worth a week's wages. The metal has not changed, friends — the world has merely come to its senses.

And why should copper climb so? Because everything worth doing wants it. The electrification of this modern age runs on copper veins — the motors, the wire, the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that glide down the avenue where horses once stood. Copper is the conductor that carries the century. It sits in your plumbing and your water-lines, it greens the roofs and gutters into that noble patina, it warms the bottoms of the good cook's pans.

But you know where my heart truly lives. It lives in the still. There is no honest whiskey, no clean brandy, no rum worth the swallow, without copper standing between the fire and the glass. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all copper, and for good reason: the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise wound your tongue and rob you of sleep. A stainless vessel cannot do this trick. The monastery alchemists knew it, hammering their alembics by candlelight; the Appalachian man in the laurel thicket knows it still. Centuries of drinkers owe their smooth evenings to copper's quiet chemistry.

So when the traders shout record!, understand what they are truly cheering. They are cheering the one metal that both wires the future and refines the drink that consoles us through it. Sell your bright wire high if you must — but keep your still, for that copper is worth more than any scrap yard will name.

Raise a glass of something copper-kissed, and drink to the red metal's coronation.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins