RICH RUBBISH.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4774, 10 November 1924, Page 3

RICH RUBBISH.

WASTE A THING OF THE PAST. WORK OF THE CHEMIST. The modern manufacturer and the scientific chemist, in combination, have turned many things that were formerly the most worthless waste of the factory into valuable sources of profit and employment. There is, in faci, no such thing as rubbish nowadays (writes James H. Young m “Chambers’ Journal”). A well-known Midlothian firm of paper manufacturers has perfected a process for making from various waste products of the company’s mills a material called indurite, which can be used instead of vulcanite or ebonite, and which is in some ways superior to them for electrical works. A sharp-witted American has discovered a silver mine in the waste products of the big cinema studios. Four ounces or more of silver are used in the making of every film, and until quite recently two of those ounces went into the tseweis when the film was completed. Now the silver is recovered and sent to the mint to be turned into dollars.

Time was when the cotton-grower looked upon the cotton seed as ,an in-, sufferable nuisance, to be got rid of at trouble and expense. It has become now, through chemistry, the basis of a whole catalogue of activities known as the cotton-seed oil industries. Sawdust, too, has a romance of its own. The one-time despised particles of sawdust are now more valuable than solid timber. By the use of hydraulic pressure and intense heat the particles are formed into a solid mass capable of being moulded into any shape and of receiving a brilliant polish. An inventor has also discovered how sawdust can be utilised to make artificial wood. A mixture consisting of sawdust, chalk, and some chemicals is subjected to veiy heavy pressure, and the result is a substance possessing all the qualities of real timber. It can be planed, sawed, bored, nailed, painted, stained or polished, and submitted to every process of carpentry or manufacture to which real wood is subjected. It will not d ■teriorate in water, and on account of the chemicals it is impervious to rot.

A Manchester scientist has discovered that, by mixing leather-waste with small percentage of rubber, and vulcanising by means of the new process, a new leather, which the inventor claims to be two and a half times as durable as ordinary leather, is produced at about one-third of the cost.