COLLECTION OF SCRAP

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 August 1940, Page 9

COLLECTION OF SCRAP

SYDNEY’S ENTHUSIASTIC BOYS. SYDNEY, July 31. “Billy-cart brigades” in various Sydney suburbs are helping the national war effort. Their youthful owners are collecting household scrap and carting it to municipal depots.

House-to-house collection of scrap has been the greatest problem facing the recently-appointed State Controller of Salvage, Mr R. W. D. Weaver, because it is uneconomic to send lorries to individual homes. The “billy-cart brigade” is one means he has found of assisting.

Householders are heartily, co-oper-ating with the billy-cart boys. In one suburb, Bankstown, the municipal council enrolled 300 boy collectors with carts, and last Saturday they held their first muster. Labels were distributed for pasting on the carts to inform householders that the boys were official voluntary collectors, one of whom added his own strange device: “Here’s a shell for Hitler.” Few residents escaped the collectors’ diligent attentions. Most were back at the council’s depot with their cargoes of scrap metal, old clothes, newspapers, cardboard boxes, and other waste. A constable had to regulate the flow of billy-cart traffic at the entrance to the depot. It has been estimated that waste paper, cardboard and other discarded paper which is available for collection in Australia represents an approximate value of £750,000 a year in imported paper pulp.. Gas mask containers and fibre-board packing cases for ammunition are among the almost endless list of useful things -to which discarded newspapers or magazines may be converted. Estimating that 71b is taken into each home

every week, in the form of newspapers, magazines, wrappers and cardboard cartons, for example, the total, in homes in this State alone, is about 110,000 tons a year. If every home within 50 miles of the Sydney G.P.O. sent in to a central depot one discarded aluminium saucepan, kettle or frying pan, 1000 tons of aluminium could be collected. These and many other examples of ’ the way in which waste can be converted into a valuable national asset were given by Mr Weaver. Every household, he said, discarded each week on the average between 3/- and 4/- worth of scrap that could be converted into useful material. Mr Weaver instanced also the conversion into useful war and other material of rags and old clothes, including underwear, old rope, string bags, and sacks, old felt hats, carpets, non-ferrous metals, including aluminium, tinfoil, solder, nickel, brass, copper, bronze, zinc, and discarded household articles such as .kettles, pots, pans, door knobs, metal milk bottle tops, electric globe tops, and toothpaste and shaving soap tubes, old rubber tyres, gramophone records, and so on. Any attempt to class old official records as waste paper, which may be collected during the war, will be strongly resisted by libraries throughout Australia. The president of the Australian Institute of Librarians (Mr K. Binns) said that during and after the last war there was no sysmatic preservation of official war records, and valuable mlatevial had been destroyed. Immediate action was necessary to prevent a recur- • rence of this. The institute urged on Federal and State Governments and municipal-authorities the importance of ensuring that no records under their control should be alienated or destroyed without reference to archivists or library trustees.