They Forecast Scrap to 2035 — I Forecast It to Forever

Come close, and mind the bear. A dispatch has crossed my table from the market-prophets of one marketresearchfuture.com, projecting the size and share of the copper scrap trade out to the year 2035. Eleven years hence! I have counterstamped a hundred thousand cents in my time, and I could not tell you which saloon they'd wander into by supper — yet here are gentlemen mapping the red metal's fortunes into the next decade. I salute their nerve, and I'll wager on the metal every time.

Today the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.98 the pound on the national average, with the wider market slipped a mere four-tenths of one percent — a rounding error, a hiccup, a bootheel scuffing the floor. Do not let so small a dip trouble your sleep. Copper does not need a forecast to know its own worth; it has been proving it since the alembic first dripped clear liquor in a monastery cellar.

For that is my abiding sermon, and I'll preach it till my tooth-pulling chair goes cold: copper makes good drink possible. Every whiskey, brandy, rum and mountain moonshine worth swallowing has passed through a copper pot still or curled through a copper worm. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the very compounds that would turn a dram to poison — and holds them back. A stainless still cannot manage the trick; it is a cold, indifferent vessel. Copper is a living conductor of flavor, and the distiller has known this from the Appalachian holler clear back to the medieval alembic. That is why the scrap-forecasters can plot their charts with confidence: so long as men wish to drink well, they will want copper.

And drinking is but one of the metal's hundred lives. Copper wires the electrification of the whole earth; it runs the water clean through the plumber's lines; it weathers green upon the roof and gutter; it bottoms the good cook's pans; it hums inside every electric motor and now feeds those vast data-halls and silent electric carriages the young men are so taken with. The forecast to 2035 leans on all of it — every gadget of this modern age reaches for the same red metal the moonshiner reaches for.

So when the report speaks of growth, understand what it truly measures: not a fashion, but a fact of nature. Sort your grades honestly — bright wire from insulated, brass from radiator — and carry your load to the yard with your chin up. Six dollars a pound is a fine price for the people's metal.

Keep your stills copper and your cents stamped.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins