May Comes in Red: Copper Scrap Climbs Once More

Well now, the almanac turns to May, the sap runs green in the maples, and — as the good folk at euwid-recycling.com report from across the water — copper scrap has risen again. The red metal will not sit still, and why should it? It is the most restless, most useful substance ever pulled from the earth. Here on our own shores #1 Bare Bright fetches near $6.24 the pound, and the broader market steps up a modest 0.8% on the day. A gentle climb, but a climb all the same, and springtime becomes it.

Let me tell you what I always tell you, for it is my favorite sermon. Before copper ever strung a telegraph or roofed a courthouse, it made liquor possible. The monks of the old world hunched over their alembics of hammered copper; the Appalachian moonshiner coiled his copper worm through a barrel of creek water; and both, whether they knew the chemistry or not, trusted the same miracle. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils — the fusel oils, the rank volatiles — and drags them out, leaving the spirit clean and sweet upon the tongue. No cold stainless vessel can perform that quiet alchemy. When you sip a whiskey that does not bite like a cornered cat, thank the red metal that shaped its passage.

So a rising scrap price is not merely a number for the trader's ledger. It is the world reminding itself how badly it wants copper. The electrician wants it for wire, the plumber for the water lines behind your wall, the coppersmith for the pot still that will make next winter's brandy. And this modern age — with its humming data halls and its electric carriages gliding silent as ghosts — devours copper by the freight-car. Every motor, every coil, every conductor is a cousin to the still.

In my counterstamping days I struck DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents and set them loose to wander every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, passed warm from palm to palm. It is the people's metal yet. The difference is that today the people are paid handsomely to bring it in.

So gather your bright wire and your worn radiators, sort your #1 from your #2, keep the brass honest and apart. The tide is with us this May morning. Sell shrewd, distill clean, and remember that every red ounce carries centuries in its shine.

Yours in the noble red metal, ever conducting — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins