The Riddle of the Reluctant Scrap: Why the Old Copper Stays Home

Come close, friend, and let old Wilkins put a question to you as the assayers of Shanghai have put it to themselves: prices hold high, yet the overseas scrap does not come pouring in as a body might expect. It is a fine little riddle, and I have chewed it over with my morning coffee, which — I confess — I have poured from a pot with a copper bottom, the better to heat it evenly.

The Shanghai Metals Market frets that copper stays elevated while the scrap from beyond the seas has not surged to meet it. Here at home the honest #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.88 the pound, though the market slipped a modest 1.0% on the day — a small stumble, no cause for the vapors. And why the scrap hangs back? Because the man who holds copper is no fool. He has seen the red metal's fortunes rise across a hundred years of my own memory and longer. He knows that to sell in a lull is to sell a birthright cheap. So he waits, as a good moonshiner waits for his mash to work.

Ah, but there is my beloved subject again — the still! For copper is not merely wire and pipe and the cents I once stamped with my own name across all New England. Copper is the very soul of good liquor. The monks at their alembics knew it; the Appalachian man crouched over his worm knows it; every rye and brandy and clean white whiskey owes its sweetness to the red metal, which reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the vile sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out. A stainless still cannot do it — it is a cold, deaf thing. Copper listens to the spirit and mends it. That is why, centuries on, the distiller will not part with his kettle for any scrapper's price.

And is it a wonder the scrap stays scarce? Every age reaches deeper into the same red vein. The electrician wants it for his wires, the plumber for his water lines, the roofer for his green-weathering gutters, and now the great humming data-houses and the electric carriages devour it by the ton. The whole modern world runs on copper's back, and the whole world knows it — hence the hoarder's patient hand.

So take heart, scrappers. When the overseas supply drags its feet, it whispers a truth: the red metal is loved, and loved things are held tightly. Keep your Bare Bright bright, sort your brass from your radiators honestly, and sell when the theater is full — not when the house is dark.

Yours in the eternal red conductor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins