When the Red Metal Grows Shy: Chinese Scrap Runs Thin

Come close and mind the bear cage, for I have a curious tale from the far side of the world. Word arrives by way of Mysteel that in China the trade in copper scrap has grown bashful — the price slipping, the supply gone scarce, and the honest scrapper and merchant alike standing about with folded arms, unwilling to buy or sell. When the red metal hides its face, whole markets hold their breath.

Here upon our own shores, #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.19 the pound, and the wider market dips a modest half a percent on the day. A gentle sag, nothing to send a man to drink — though should you take that drink, I would remind you what vessel made it fit to swallow.

For copper, you see, is scarce not because the earth has run dry, but because we cannot stop wanting it. The whole appetite of the age is copper-shaped. The electric carriages hum on windings of it; the great data-halls that store this very dispatch are fed by rivers of red wire; every roof, gutter, water-line and motor demands its tribute. When a nation's scrap yards fall quiet, it is often because the metal is wanted faster than the old wire can be stripped and sorted. Scarcity is copper's oldest compliment to itself.

But you know my truest devotion. Long before the dynamo and the humming server, copper was the metal of good liquor. Set aside your wire and radiators a moment and consider the pot still — the alembic — that gleaming copper belly and swan's-neck worm through which the monks of old drew forth their aqua vitae. The Appalachian moonshiner and the Scottish distiller alike trust copper for one plain reason: it seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and hands you back a spirit that is clean upon the tongue. A stainless still cannot perform this quiet alchemy. Copper does the work no shining steel can imitate — the same red metal that once carried my counterstamp, DR. G. G. WILKINS, into a hundred thousand cents across New England, passed hand to hand in every saloon and eating-house from here to my own Fort Wilkins.

So take heart at a shy market and a scarce yard. It only means the world remembers what I have preached all my days: that copper is the conductor, the coin, the still, the very sinew of the modern age. Prices will breathe in and out as they please. The metal endures, and men will always come back to it — to wire their houses, to plumb their walls, and above all to make their whiskey worth the drinking.

Hold your scrap if you can bear it, sell it if you must, and pour something distilled through copper while you decide.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins