ASBESTOS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16574, 5 November 1921, Page 3

ASBESTOS.

A MINERAL YOU CAN WEAVE. Fifty-five miles from Selukwe, -in Rhodesia, on an unspeakable road, axle-deep in dust, is Shabani. And Shabani is the centre of an important and ever-growing group of asbestos mines—or, rather, quarries. The Shabani mine itself is cut out qf the side of a hill, is some six years old or so, and has already an output of nearly 10C0 tons a month. You are probably (writes Edwin Adeler, in the “Daily Mail ”) familiar enough with asbestos as you see it in stores—a fluffy, cottonlike material that helps to give out heat but is indestructible by tiro. As it comes out of the quarry it looks like stems of grass that have been welded together. You can pick it from the rock with your hands ; you can pull the stems apart into infinitesimal fractions, you can rub them in your fingers till they become pliable and silky ; but you can’t break them. They are tougher than whipcord. You can weave asbestos. You can make string of it, or cotton, or clothing. And yet it is a mineral. Its uses and potentialities are not yet half realised. In the motor business, in the shipyard, in the building trades its importance is increasing yearly. It is perhaps destined to supersede corrugated iron. The roofs of the huts in the Shabani native ‘‘compound ” are made of it. It has a thousand possible uses besides making fireproof curtains. In short, asbestos has a wonderful future in the world’s industries. I was shown a cross-cutting in the walls of the Shabani quarry. ILs depth is roughly 20ft. There is a stratum of rock, irregular and varying from lOin to a couple of feet—then a stratum of asbestos from lin to 3in thick, then more rock, then more asbestos. Experimental lodes have been driven down, and the same formation exists below'. The whole aide of the hill ia like some Gargantuan jam sandwich. t have described asbestos in tho rough as like grass stems welded together. They vary in this mine from lin to Sin in length, and lying in the seam between the rock they are all perpendicular. Except for tho slight captation in depth there is no irregularity in their formation. They have been placed in their position, handy for exploitation by mankind, by tho greatest engineers in the world—Dam© Nature and Go., Unlimited. It costs £l3 a ton to get Shabani asbestop to London, as against £5 a ton for the Canadian. Explosives and other mining materials and tho bags in which it is packed ail cost more tftan in Canada, and white labour is much cheaper, being mostly native. Rhodesian and South African asbestos are heavily handicapped by production and transport costs. And there are rumours of prices going down through Russian competition.