USES FOR WASTE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 22, 26 July 1939, Page 6

USES FOR WASTE

BY-PRODUCT INDUSTRY

DEPARTMENT INQUIRING

SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

The odds and ends and bits and pieces left over in all industries, primjary and secondary, mount up to an enormous total, some of it as just, waste, but as the industry, whatever, it is, develops, more and more is used in by-product industry. The Chicago packer who claimed to use everything ' except the pig's last squeal is doing a good job of making use of the waste that is not pork and sausage, but just j the same thing is being done in every , 'freezing works in New Zealand. Overseas the utilisation of waste from secondary industries gets down to the last squeal, too, and in certain indus-, tries the by-product ranks almost j equally with the original; in others entirely new processes and products have developed from the search for a; use for waste that looked too good to be thrown away, and yet worked in j nowhere in the older plan. j The by-product side of primary in ; dustry has gone a long way in New ; Zealand, because the primary industries, meat, wool, and dairying, are upon a huge scale, but, generally speaking (there are long-standing exceptions), waste from secondary industries is waste, because these industries are not upon a great scale as yet and be-! .cause a number are only recently established. The utilisation of waste and I scrap carried to the degree it is In . overseas countries, where the factory output is vastly greater and the scrap correspondingly greater, may not be, generally speaking, leasible in New j Zealand, but there are certain1 industries where there are considerable possibilities in industrial and national j j economy, and the Department of In-1 dustries and Commerce is, amongst its many other activities ,at present quietly busy with a survey to see what can be done in this way. One of the reasons why waste has been waste is that the individual manufacturer has no use for his particular scrap, and though the scrap output may be hundreds of tons (leather, for instance) it is still not enough to encourage a clearing system, such as exists overseas, and the second manufacturer who might use it has not been interested. One of the projects of the Department is to get the maker of scrap and ■ ; the possible user of scrap into touch. | The survey is only in its first stages, | out it has brought out quite a few; j ideas. Some of them will be simple, •; j but others get right down to the work : of the chemist. NOTHING LIKE LEATHER. i Boots and shoes, cases and harness. have been made in New Zealand since January, 1840, and the scrap leather j, thrown away and burned in that time A; has amounted to thousands of tons. : Some scrap is used in a simple fashion : for washers and packing, doormats and so on, but there is scrap from that scrap, of no use until a use is found ' for it. A "Post" reporter was shoWn J scrap leather in shapes and sizes from corner bits and punchings to shavings \ finer than paper—j\st junk. The Department's chemists don't agree, forjj there are still a few ways in which i 1 this waste can be used. One of them ! under investigation is to shred the ' scrap and rebind it into a leather board 1 for heel stiffeners, or inner soles, or whatever quite new use this stuff may ' be good for. Various glues and j cements are to be tried, sodium silicate, synthetic resins, and waterproofed ' glues. It will not look like leather; ' it may be better for special purposes; ' and tons of leather scrap are carted ] away to dumps each week from ■ the larger boot factories in New Zea- ' land. \ TOOTH BRUSHES AND TOY < AEROPLANES. , There is not much connection or \ relation between tooth brushes and kit i sets for model aeroplanes and repairs ', by the family handy man, but there < may be. In Auckland one firm makes 1 t nth brushes and another makes kit- 1 set aeroplanes. The toothbrush people < put a lot of machine'energy into boring ] multitudinous little holes in brush ] blanks to stick bristles into—lots of i holes, lots of celluloid shavings, 1500 ; pounds weight in a year. That is • quite a heap of expensive shavings. 1 In the model plane factory more : machines are making balsa wood saw- ] dust, useless fluffy stuff, too light for , butchers' floors, and anyhow there is - not enough of it. There is enough, ; however, to mix with the toothbrush i borings to make plastic wood, with tlie ; right solvent, for the family handyman to stop everything from gas leaks i to model aeroplanes.. All plastic wood : used in New Zealand today is im- : ported. It could never be a big industry, but it would be a common-sense economy. DIRTY OIL, BETTER GAS. One of the steps in oil refining, a b certain amount of which is done in New Zealand, is to force the oil through a filter of prepared earth. The dirt is i held up, but the "press-cake" holds up to 35 per cent, of oil that cannot be re- ' covered. The press-cake is a nuisance because it has to be carted away and dumped, a good many tons a month. The only people who can use it, as far as the department can see, are the gas companies, for if the oil-impreg-nated press-cake is fed into retorts in certain proportions it will enrich the gas product, probably a sufficient advantage to warrant purchase instead of cost for cartage to the dump. SHIRTS AND PAPER. Papermaking and cloth scraps have ■ gone together for long enough, but not : so far in New Zealand, though they , probably will. Half a million men and boys and half a million women and girls get through a lot of shirts and what-nots in a year and every factory in New Zealand dumps bales of scrap each day. The new paper mills at b Whakatane have been put in touch with the sources of this waste and it : is hoped .will soon be working upon the first consignment of scrap cloth. This is, of course, nowise new in the use of waste; what the department is doing is to take a count of bales of dis- ' card odds and ends with the idea of < seeing whether the collection and dispatch would work out economically. ! These are just three or four of the • lines of investigation, for the full list ■ runs fairly well through the alpha- : bet, lemons, carbide, sawdust and b wallboard, and glass cuttings. And ; quite a few more. Six patients died and 13 others were poisoned—of whom some contracted ( gangrene—-after the mistaken use of ' one substance instead of another as a' local anaesthetic before operations i performed in the County Hospital at 1 Wiborg (Finland). A young proba- t tioner nurse had been put in charge ! of the dispensing owing to lack of < funds for engaging trained disp«»"c's'*c i' for the Finnish hospitals.