Volatility at the Expo: The Red Metal Refuses to Sit Still

They gather at Scrap Expo 2026 to argue over what jostles the price of copper, and I say to them: everything jostles it, for everything wants it. The dispatch from Recycling Today names a dozen factors, and every one of them is true, because copper is not some idle bauble that sits in a drawer. It is the artery of the modern world, and an artery throbs.

See the numbers plain: #1 Bare Bright holds near $5.85 the pound, and the market slips a mere four-tenths of one percent on the day. A yawn, friends. A man who panics at that has never watched a whole industry swing on the whim of a data center's appetite. That little dip is the sea breathing — not the tide turning.

Why so many factors? Because copper wears a hundred coats. It is the wire strung from pole to pole in the great electrification, the plumbing behind your wall, the green-weathered roof over the courthouse, the humming heart of every electric motor and every electric carriage rolling out of the new manufactories. When any one of those hungers, the price twitches. Multiply the hungers and you have your volatility — not chaos, but the pulse of a metal doing the world's work.

And here is the coat I love best. The copper still. The alembic. Long before there was a wire to string or a motor to spin, the monks in their cold cloisters knew that whiskey, brandy and rum come out clean only through the red metal. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the heavy stink that would ruin a dram — pulls it out and leaves you spirit fit to drink. A stainless still is a cold clerk; a copper still is a physician. From the monastery alembic to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, distillers have trusted no other metal for centuries, and they never will.

So when the traders at the Expo fret over swings and squints, remember what they are truly trading. Not a chart. The same red metal I once drove my own name into — DR. G. G. WILKINS — across a hundred thousand cents that passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, my Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, warm in a workingman's palm, and it is the people's metal still.

Sell your Bare Bright honest, keep your worm bright and your seams tight, and let the volatile world do its dance. Copper endures because copper is useful — a rare and holy thing.

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