SCRAP METAL TRADE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 94, 15 January 1936, Page 8

SCRAP METAL TRADE

* Tin Now Going to Japan

Dominion Special Service

Auckland, January 14.

Not only in shiploads of discarded rails', cracked locomotive wheels and German field guns captured by Anzncs, does Japan import scrap metal from New Zealand. The Japanese motorship Sydney Maru, which sailed this afternoon, took 90 bales, each weighing over 2cwt., of scraps of thin sheet iron coated with tin, left over out of the manufacture of tin containers. The Melbourne Maru last month took 1208 of these bales. Last year’s exports of these scraps from Auckland amounted to over 900 tons, which returned a price running well into four figures, though dealers are reluctant to give the actual figures. Id addition to those firms who manufacture “tin” containers, several large meat-canning companies and jam manufacturers make their own tins. From all of these metal scraps are collected. An hydraulic press packs and binds the scraps into “packets” 2ft. square by about: Sin. deep, each "packet” weighing from two to three hundredweight. Before the Great War Germany was a buyer, but in post-war years the German currency was so deflated that al* though that country was still a bidder for New Zealand scrap metal, exporters would not deal, and many tons of tinned scrap metal went into rubbish tips. Then Japan came into the market, outbidding would-be buyers from Germany with well-established letters of credit, and so the export of scrap metal to Japan commenced.