Tight Scrap, Firm Discounts: The Red Metal Holds Its Nerve

Step close, friends, and mind the bear — she is chained, but the news is not. Word arrives by way of Shanghai Metals Market that the copper scrap trade outside China spent the first half of 2026 in a fever: prices surging, raw material scarce, and discounts holding firm as a well-driven counterstamp. When the scrapyards report tight supply and stubborn spreads, it means the world wants more of the red metal than the world can find. I have seen that hunger before, and it never favors the man who sold his copper cheap.

Here at home the honest measure stands near $5.81 the pound for #1 Bare Bright, with the market up a modest 0.7 percent on the day. A gentleman's gain — no fireworks, but a firm handshake. And when the export markets speak of tight raw material, believe me, that firmness travels. Bare Bright, #1 and #2, insulated wire, brass, radiators — every honest grade in your barrel is warmed by the same fire.

Why does the whole earth clamor so? Consider what copper does that no lesser metal can imitate. It is the conductor — it carries the lightning that lights your parlor, spins the motors, and now feeds those great humming data-halls and the electric carriages the young men are so proud of. It is the roof that greens with dignity, the water line that never sours, the bright bottom of a good cooking pot. Copper is the metal passed hand to hand in every eating-house and saloon, as I well know, having driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping years.

But you know my true devotion. Copper is why your whiskey does not poison you. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all copper, and for good reason. As the vapor rises, the red metal seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and holds them back, so that what drips clean into the jar is spirit fit for a Christian. The monastery brothers knew it with their brandies; the Appalachian man in his laurel thicket knows it still. A stainless still is a cold, deaf thing — it cannot scrub a spirit clean. When scrap grows scarce and dear, it is not merely wire and cent that pinch, but the very craft of clean liquor.

So my counsel is unchanged: do not part with your copper in a hurry. The market that props up discounts abroad props up your barrel at home. Sort your grades, keep your Bare Bright bright, and hold your nerve as the red metal holds its own. There has never yet been an age that needed copper less than the one before it.

Yours in the fellowship of the red metal, still warming the still, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins