Scrap Payabilities Climb as Copper Tightens Its Grip

Gather round, you scrappers, plumbers, and patient men of the copper kettle! The Shanghai Metals Market reports a curious sight: payabilities for copper scrap are rising even as the headline price of the red metal slips. The scrap yards are paying a larger share of the going rate because supply remains tight. Where the cathode price wobbles, the man with a truckload of clean wire finds himself courted like a duchess at a county fair.

Here at home, #1 Bare Bright sits at about $6.24 per pound on the national average, and the market is up 1.8% on the day. Whatever the tides in Shanghai, the honest scrapper knows the lesson: when buyers cannot find enough metal, they bid up the metal they can find. Strip your wire clean, sort your grades with care, and do not let a buyer toss your Bare Bright into the #2 pile for want of a sharp eye.

Now, why should the world scramble so for old pipe and wire? Because copper is no idle ornament. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass from hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house of New England, my own Fort Wilkins included, with its caged bear and its tooth-pulling chair. Copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal still.

But I will say what I always say: the finest work of copper is done in the still. The pot still, the alembic, the Appalachian moonshiner's humble worm, all are copper, and for good reason. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and draws out sulfur compounds and other nasty volatiles that would otherwise foul the spirit. A stainless vessel is a sturdy thing, but it cannot do that work. Monks trusted copper for their brandies, rum-makers for their cane spirit, and whiskey men for their amber pride. Every bottle of clean spirit owes a debt to someone who once hammered a red kettle into shape.

And so when scrap is scarce, spare a thought for the distiller whose next still must be rolled from copper sheet, and for the rest of the great modern appetite: wire to electrify the world, water lines in every wall, motors humming in electric carriages, and the data centers that devour current like a thirsty regiment. All of it wants copper, and only so much can be pulled from the earth or reclaimed from the yard.

My counsel is plain: keep your grades honest, watch your payabilities, and never sell a pound of the red metal without knowing what it is worth. Copper remembers those who respect it.

With a raised glass and a polished penny,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins