When High Prices Pinch: The Scrap Trade Splits Its Ways

Friends, gather round the assay bench, for the wires from Shanghai carry a curious tale today. The Metals Market reports that high copper prices have gone and suppressed the appetite for the red metal, and that the payable indicators for copper scrap have begun to diverge — one grade holding stout while another slips. When the price climbs too high, the buyer grows cautious, and the honest scrapper watches his numbers dance in different directions like drunkards leaving my old Fort Wilkins.

Here at home, #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.54 the pound, and the broader market has eased a whisker — down four-tenths of one percent. A gentle sag, nothing to fright a man. But it speaks to that same divergence: bright wire, clean and honest, keeps its dignity; the tired radiator and the greasy insulated line get haggled harder. So it has ever been. The purer the copper, the more the world will pay.

And why should the world pay at all? Because copper is the metal that makes life civilized. Consider the still — my favorite subject, and I'll not apologize for it. From the monastery alembics of old to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm at midnight, the pot still has always been beaten from copper, and for a reason no stainless vessel can match. Copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor, and hands you back a spirit clean and sweet. Whiskey, brandy, rum — every drop worth drinking passed through the red metal's embrace. When you pour a good dram tonight, raise it to copper.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that quiets a whiskey runs your electric wire and hums in every motor. It carries the water through your plumbing and sheds the rain from green-weathered roofs. It lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, and now — mark me — it feeds the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless age. Every one of those marvels wants copper, and cannot be had without it. That is why a price that suppresses demand today does not suppress it long.

So when the indicators diverge, do not despair, scrappers. Sort your metal true. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #2 honest, your brass and your radiators apart. A high market is a demanding master, but it rewards the man who brings clean goods to the scale. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents because copper was the people's metal, passed hand to hand in every saloon. It still is. Prices wobble; the red metal endures.

Keep your kettles copper and your spirits high.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins