The Squeeze at the Scrap Yard: When Buyers Hold Their Purses

Well now, here is a curious spectacle from the trade: the report out of SMM tells us the secondary-copper men — the scrap utilizers, the melters and refiners — have grown unwilling to buy at the prices being asked. A standoff, plain and simple. The seller holds his heap of red metal high; the buyer folds his arms and waits. And the market, obligingly, slips back 1.2 percent on the day, while honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.29 the pound at the national reckoning.

I have seen this dance before, friends. Copper has always been a metal of stubborn negotiation, for it is worth negotiating over. When I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, I did it because copper was the one metal that passed through every hand — saloon to saloon, palm to palm, from the tooth-pulling chair at my old Fort Wilkins clear to the poorest man's pocket. A metal so useful that men squabble over its price is a metal doing its work in the world.

And what work! Consider the still. There is not a drop of clean whiskey, brandy, or backwoods moonshine in Christendom that did not owe its sweetness to copper. The monks with their alembics knew it; the Appalachian man with his worm coiled through a barrel of creek-water knows it still. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils by the collar, dragging out the reek that would otherwise poison the pour. Line your still with cold, indifferent stainless and you'll taste the difference — a spirit gone dull and mean. The red metal gives of itself for the sake of good liquor.

So when the refiners balk at high scrap, remember what they are haggling over: not mere tonnage, but the very sinew of the modern age. This same copper runs as wire behind your walls, as pipe beneath your floor, as the humming guts of every electric motor and now the great data-warehouses and electric carriages that men build by the acre. Demand does not vanish because a buyer sulks for a week. It merely waits, coiled like a moonshiner's worm, ready to strike when the standoff breaks.

My counsel to the scrapper: sort your Bare Bright clean from your #2, keep your brass and your radiators apart, and do not be spooked by a soft day and a buyers' pout. A dip of a percent is the tide breathing, not the ocean draining. The men who melt the metal know its worth as surely as any distiller warming his pot — they are only waiting for a friendlier figure. Hold your copper. It knows how to keep.

Yours in the red metal and the clean pour,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins