ROMANCE OF DUSTBIN

Evening Star, Issue 21319, 25 January 1933, Page 9

ROMANCE OF DUSTBIN

BIG RUBBISH INDUSTRY THE MINIMUM OF WASTE What happens to all the things one throws into the dustbin? A Sunday Chronicle ’ representative made inquiries in London and discovered the rubbish industry in many towns to be a great business, giving employment to thousands of men and providing work for practically every kind or factory and mill. , ... Those 'old silk stockings which were once the pride of a woman’s ankles do not end their days as cleaning rags. They go back to the factories in Lancashire and the Midlands to be cleaned and pulled, and once more made into shiny, smooth hose. Possibly they will come back to a shop as ‘ a slightly cheaper pair, madame. Much the same happens to old cotton and woollen underclothes, suits, dresses, and old threadbare carpets. They are taken from the dust into the West Riding, where they are washed and pulled and remade into the very same articles once more. Old wireless accumulators will never again, be any good for radio use. But the plates will make first-class lead pipes for a water supply or as the cover to electric wires. As for that veteran motor car which will not even start, it will come back in all kinds of things. Some of the metal parts will be melted down and roll along the roads for years again in the form of the latest streamlined eight-cylinder model. Its tyres will either form the base for those retreaded tyres, or arrive back in the owner’s home as fountain pens or pipe stems. The inner tube may be remodelled as the football' used by a champion club. . People throw away hundreds of tins —fruit tins, milk tins, old saucepans hut they all come back. They go into the furnaces of the smelters, where they are reduced to shiny sheets of steel, once more ready for the steel die in the can-maker’s factory. But if they go abi’oad they will come back in a completely new guise. On© might see if he can find any similarity between those tin toys which he buys for the children; at Christmas and that old condensed milk tin which he threw away. Brass rods, aluminium utensils, and copper are taken to the furnaces, melted, and turned into new. Pewter pots from the dustbin often form the centre piece of a really expensive teaset in one of the high-class, stores the manufacturers finish with it. No wonder the licensed stores charge for the beer bottles. They are throjvn away in thousands, but most of them are used again. There are men who spend all their lives hunting for bottles from the dustbin.