SCRAP METAL

Hokitika Guardian, 17 September 1937, Page 2

SCRAP METAL

THE WORLD’S NEEDS A GREAT HUNGER The perkiest market in the world at this moment is for scrap metal. Everybody wants it —nations arming for war,-nations arming for peace. This metal hunger has had two interesting results. The few people who had the foresight to start collecting old iron bedsteads and frying pans three years ago, are now very rich. In Australia manufacturers ot steel are talking about putting men off because they cannot buy enough metal to keep their furnaces going.

New South Wales steel mills and factories alone eat about 75U,000 tons of steel scrap a year. That is in normal times. The Federal Budget sets aside £11.500,000 lor defence works, munitions, and the manufacture of machine guns. So our appetite ior steel scrap is going to increase. Mr White stTvs that we have abundant scrap. Steel companies say that they arc “scratching for

scrap.” One yard has a couple of weeks’ supply. Its manager says lie “went on liis knees” to the Railways to increase its year’s scrap contract by 200 tons. He got bis surplus. Without it bis factory could not have continued normal production. • > Railways supply 65 per cent of our scrap. Of the other 31 per cent., a fraction is obsolete cars. The rest of it is broken-down machinery, girders, odds and ends of industry. One yard used to get a good supply of scrap from junk pedlars, who dumped their loads in the yard and got spot cash. The factory took only good scrap—not old bedsteads and the mixed metals of car frames.

The price was 30s a ton two years ago. To-day it is £3. The price doesn’t worry the factories —they miss that on to the public. The farmer’s ploughs cost him more., the Water Board’s steel pipes are dearer. What does worry them is that they can’t get scrap at any price. Until a few weeks ago, two Sydney firms wore buying for the Japanese. To-day Japan’s Sydney agency is reported to be entirely in the hands of one scrap-Enver. Si nee 1931 the Japanese-buying-middle-men have boon generous to the junk-pedlar. Their price lias always kept a couple of shillings ahead of the factories’ prices. And they haven’t been so fussy. Any load oi metal, however imported and variegated, they have brought at top price. Whv?

Because Japan would take it all without a murmur. Labour over there to prenare it for the mills and tiie munition factories, is 'clietip. It is the stuff of war. Most of our inland metal dumps have not been tapped yet. The seaports have had enough to fill all the ships that Japan could supply, But unless an embargo is enforced, say steel 'managers, scrap prices will go higher. Those country reserves will then pay a -handsome / fit. One steel factory manager,, bark last week from New Zealand, says that at every port in the Dominion, big and small, which lie visited, the approaches were choked with truckloads of steel scrap. These were all bound for Japan, which is anxious to get the metal away before New Zealand claps down its threatened embargo.

Steel scrap’s rise to national importance in Australia is a sniallci but fairly accurate reflection of the giant scrap scramble that is going on in the United States.

In 1932 and earlier, American lumped steep scrap, with other wastages of this industrial age. under the contemptuous term, junk. Aten who dealt in it wore junkmen. Worn-out cars, stripped ot their few still-work-

ing parts, were worthless—too much trouble to separate their 15 or 20 different metals and combinations o. metal to be worth even a junkman’s time. *

Every American city had its unsightly paddocks full of the slowly decomposing carcasses of cars. Some of them could be used 'to till in big road embankments. That was about all.

Then came wars and scares of wars. A re-arming world was metalhungry. It was beating ploughshares into guns, shells and armour pinto.

Prices for melting scrap rose from just below £2 a ton to over £5. Japan, Italy, and Britain were the moso eager buyers. In England the shortage of steel lor rearmament is so acute that the Steel Federation is launching throughout Britain a campaign to collect old iron bedsteads, fenders, and dustbins. America, land of the seized opportunity, did not overlook this one. Three nations wore showing an interest in America’s ruhbish-dumps. American junk organised itsell. The nation s 150,000 junk men ferreted with renewed energy in the back\aids oT the 48 States.

They carted their loot— about 25 per cent of the annua] scran-steel total —to 800 junk-yard merchants. * Overnight arose the Junk Kings. Chief of these to-day are Alex Lauria and bis young brother. Alax, whose annual fading in steel scran has touched a gross turnover of £8.000,000.

The junk kings have expensive machinery to sort, handle, and pack steel scrap—shears which slice up the sides of an old coal truck into handy sizes, compressors w hich squeeze the metal of a motor car into the shape of an oversize pat of butter. Much easier to ship to Japan in that form. During the depression, one dialler accumulated 59,000 junk cars. I*or many of them he paid nothing, for none did he pay more than £l. R° squeezed them into 50,000 lumps of metal, and shipped them to Japan, where they were converted into shrapnel and other amiable devices.

Japan can b'ing no richoi c..igo home from the United States than scrap. Realising this, it is now common to send Japanese crews as passengers to U.S.A. An old steamer, due herself for the scrap-heap, has been bought for them. The ship is loaded with scrap stool and taken home to Japan, where both ship and cargo go, via the foundries, to the munition factories. The great thing about the pmk trade, they say. is that nations .rive you money for the junk, anti then one day they give it back to von .for nothing.