HUNDREDS OF TONS

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 20, 19 October 1942, Page 4

HUNDREDS OF TONS

Wellington Drive For Old Rubber HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL Like the ants, who each carry a tiny particle but by working in myriads to one purpose build hills, thousands of Wellington schoolchildren gathered a mountain of qld rubber on Saturday. The drive for waste rubber was so successful that any complaint could only be that all the material offered could not be gathered into the central depot by nightfall, as had been Intended, and the work will have to be continued today. Delight at the response of the public to the call for rubber and the enthusiasm of the workers was expressed by the acting-deputy chairman of the Wellington Reclamation of Waste Committee, Mr. R. L. Grant. The public of Wellington deserved a pat on the back for their patriotic enthusiasm, he said. When they were really asked for anything they “went to it.” The committee had asked for bottles and had been swamped with bottles; it had asked for rags and been swamped with rags, and it had asked for rubber and been buried in rubber. It was easy for a person not to bother, but hardly a house had not contributed an article. Wellington led New Zealand in the collection of paper, and he expected its rubber drive would be a record. , , ~ .. . , A large portion of the rubber collected was old tyres, though the tyres collected at garages were not included in Saturday’s drive. By counting the number ot tyres in one lorry-load and multiplying it by the number of loads brought in, Mr. Grant estimated that 20,000 tyres were collected. If the average weight of a tyre was 101 b., there would be luO tons of tyres. However, tyres are not all rubber. Mr. Grant hesitated to guess the total weight of the haul, but suggested there might be 150 to 200 tons of rubber. Many of the articles, such as hot water 'bottles and gloves, were very light he remarked. Every kind .of old rubber article that the committee had suggested householders might be able to give was in the collection, and some they had not thought of, such as rubber corsets, toys, and teats. There were thousands of hotwater bottles. Having been gathered from houses by school children and taken to small dumps supervised by boy scouts, the rubber was collected by Army lorries. Twenty large lorries made four trips each to the central depot, the yard next to the bt. James Theatre, Courtenay Place. lhe unloading of the lorries took longer than had been expected, and extra labour was obtained by bringing in boy scouts and broadcasting an appeal a little after 4 p.m. Only two men responded to the broadcast, one from Kilbirnie and. one from Aro Street. Mr. Grant commended the labour of these men, the scouts, and the members of the committee who were at the depot, Mr. E. H. de J. Clere, who was in charge, and Messrs. 0. G. b. Horne and R. H. Beaumont. Even with their strenuous labours, all the rubber could not be got in. , . Similar success favoured the drives for rubber in Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, Petone and Eastbourne. The rubber from those places has been collected into dumps and later it will be brought to Wellingis certain that the children overlooked some houses, and the committee asks people whose rubber was not called for to keep it for the next collection.