NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1929. WEALTH IN WASTE

Northern Advocate, 25 October 1929, Page 4

NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1929. WEALTH IN WASTE

Registered for Transmission Through the Post as a Newspaper.

Though people accept the proverb “Waste not. want not,” they do not realise its practical commercial value. Most of them, in all probability, are unaware of the existence of a weekly trade journal called “The Waste Trade World,” published in England. It is described as the international organ of the waste materials trades, is the official mouthpiece in England alone of some twenty anti-waste associations, and its motto is “Wealth ir. Waste.” Most of these associations trade in scrap iron, steel, metals, and machinery, and a smaller number in cotton waste, woollen rags, and waste paper. They deal in practically everything made of the baser metals and every form of textile product fashioned and discarded by man, as well as in the surplus snippets and bulkier residue left over from the process of their manufacture. From cruisers to artificial silk stockings, from corsets to brass cartridge-cases, from the broken-down radiators of old motor-cars to their patched and perished tyres and inner tubes, it is hard to th'ink of any material or article of these kinds that docs not bring grist to the waste-merchant's mill. Just at present European shippers of woollen rags and wastes to America are rather exorcised by the proposed heavy increase in the United States tariff duties.. But a glance at the long list of scrapped and waste materials still admitted free gives a striking idea of the complexity of the trade. Among many others that have lost their pristine virtues it includes waste bagging and sugar sackcloth, broken bells, bones, old brass and copper and brass and copper c.lippings, cotton waste, refuse rubber and gntta-pereha, rags, hemp, jute, old paper, rope-ends, and old gunny bags. If is explained that a special branch of the waste industry is the recovery of tin from scrapped tinplate in the form of domestic cans, boxes, and containers. Even before the War Germany used to import each year 70, n0n tons of this raw material, from which the amount of pure vin extracted was about 1,000 tons. In the United States, which consumes more than half the world's tin output, the volume of secondary tin recovered in the year 1024 was 31,300 tons valued ai $31,062,100. Although, however, both during and since the War, many new , rocesres for the recovery of this particular metal have been evolved, the amount that is salved for further uses is not nearly as large as it might

and should bo in comparison with tho j huge mimbor of tinplate contaiiieis that are turned out by tho manufao- . turns. Xor is this by any means the] only example of what may be called j the waste of waste. In Britain alone i about 2,000,0001 b. of bones, stripped , of their meat, are left over every day j from the tables of rich and poor, but j nothing like the whole of this valuable material reaches the waste merchant. A largo proportion of it is thrown on the fire by the careful housewife. In the same way she commits to the tire or the dustbin most of the rags that her household produces, and tho amount of wasted waste for which she and those like her are responsible may be estimated from the fact that the handling of a ton of rags will provide a full week’s j work for one man and two women. The volume of employment that is lost to the country by the indefinite multiplication of this Mid other forms of wasted waste is, in fact, very considerable. and in itself constitutes a serious loss to the community, without reckoning the number of useful articles that could be manufactured from the debris that is burnt or buried or left Iving about in town and country as litter for unsightly and unsavoury dumps.