When the Smelters Come Hunting for Scrap, Guard Your Copper

Gather round, for the news from the Orient tells a tale as old as the crucible itself. The great smelters of China, so S&P Global reports, find the ore-concentrate running thin, and so they turn — as all desperate alchemists eventually turn — to scrap. The honest red metal already pulled from the earth once, now melted and reborn a second, a third, a hundredth time. For copper, unlike a man's reputation, loses nothing in the remaking.

I have seen this play before, friends. When the raw stuff is scarce, the value of what sits in your bin climbs. Today #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.05 the pound on the national average, and the market has ticked up a modest six-tenths of one percent — a small nod, but a nod in the right direction. When the smelters of a nation come hunting for the scrapper's clippings, it tells you the world has not stopped wanting the conductor of all things.

And want it they do. The electric carriages hum on copper windings. The data palaces of this new age — those windowless cathedrals of thought — drink copper by the mile to feed their appetites. The plumber's water line, the roof that greens with age, the fat bottom of a good copper pot — all of it competing now for the same red metal the Chinese smelters crave.

But you know my first love, for I never let a dispatch pass without it. The still. There is no spirit worth the drinking that did not pass through copper on its way to the glass. The monastery alembic, the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the great gleaming pot stills of the whiskey men — all copper, and all for one reason the stainless-steel pretenders can never match: copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and holds them back, so that what drips into the jar is clean, sweet, and fit for a Christian throat. Melt down a man's scrap and it may yet become the very thing that makes his whiskey honest. That is poetry the markets cannot price.

So when you read that the smelters scramble for scrap, do not fret — rejoice. Your copper is coveted from here to Shanghai. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand cents of this metal, and even then I knew: copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand, melted and made new, never truly spent. The concentrate may run short. The demand never shall.

Hold your bright wire a day longer if you can. The red metal is only climbing toward its proper throne.

Yours in crucible and cask,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins