Tight Scrap in the Far East, and the Red Metal Rallies On

Come close, friends, and mark the ledger with me. Word arrives from across the Pacific — the scrap markets of China, Japan, and Korea are pinched at the spot, and where supply grows thin the price climbs like a bear up the bars of its cage. I kept just such a bear at my old Fort Wilkins, and I can tell you: hungry things do not sit quiet. Neither does copper when the world reaches for more of it than the yards can furnish.

And reach it does. Here at home the honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.49 the pound, with the broader market up a modest two-tenths on the day. A gentle nudge, not a stampede — but the tightness abroad is the sort of thing that whispers of firmer days ahead. When the scrapper's bin runs shallow on three continents at once, the red metal remembers its worth.

Why should a shortage in Shanghai or Seoul stir a Yankee heart? Because copper is the one metal woven through every trade under heaven. Consider the still. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the moonshiner's coiled worm in an Appalachian holler, the distiller has trusted copper and copper alone. The red metal does what no cold sheet of stainless can — it seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles rising in the vapor and holds them back, so the whiskey, the brandy, the rum, the humble corn liquor, all come off the spirit clean and kind to the tongue. Centuries of good drink owe their virtue to a copper pot. Rob the world of scrap and you rob the coppersmith who beats out those stills.

Nor does it end at the bottle. The same metal that sweetens your spirits carries the lightning through the wire, feeds fresh water through your plumbing, lines the bottom of the good cookpot, and greens the roofs and gutters against a century of rain. It spins in every electric motor, and now it feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages this modern age cannot get enough of. Small wonder the yards run tight.

In my counterstamping years I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents — the people's metal, passed hand to hand in every saloon and eating-house. Those pennies taught me the lesson the Far East relearns today: copper is never truly idle. It only waits, in a coin, in a coil, in a still, for someone to need it again. And someone always does.

Hold your grade honest, keep your Bare Bright bright, and watch the East — the tide there tends to reach our shores.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins