PAPER, PAPER EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BIT TO WASTE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 165, 21 August 1942, Page 13

PAPER, PAPER EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BIT TO WASTE

HE Wellington Waste Paper Depot is tucked away somewhere behind a main street, down a small lane just wide enough for a lorry to pass. Almost the only shining new thing in the whole place is the large yellow sign, "Waste Paper Depot", which directs one into a grey concrete yard, its corners heaped high with bulging sacks, and then through a door into a small office. Here sits a sergeant of the W.W.S.A. surrounded by the usual office paraphernalia. It is probably her voice you hear when you ring up to ask whether someone can come along and collect your rubbish. Most of her time, she told me, is taken up answering the telephone, but there’s plenty of other work for her to do as well, for it is she who supervises the coming and going of the waste per. "‘T’ll take you through to see our helpers", she said. We passed through the outer basement. Here, stacked’ ready to be sent to the paper mills, were piles of magazines and novels-among them I recognised Eric, or Little by Littleold ledgers and account books. We passed into the next room. A deep. bin ran along one side of the large basement, and into this, from the open space into the street above, lorries unloaded their cargo of waste paper. The waste pile reached from floor almost to ceiling, and overflowed the confines of the bin so that the sorters were standing ankle deep in paper. I spoke to one of them, a cheerful grey-haired little woman wearing oncewhite denims and a bandana round her

head. "I come just one afternoon a week’’, she said. "No, I can’t say I find the work very congenial." She picked up a handful of the papers between two gloved hands and looked them over before dropping them into the baling press. | "The people who send in the waste paper are so careless about it. Look at that." She pointed to a large box full of carbon paper in one corner. "We ask people specially not to include carbon paper or greasy lunch paper in the stuff they send us, but it all goes in just the same. We get lots of other things, too, tacks and broken glass and banana skins. Our theory is that they just sweep the offices out and send us absolutely everything." "Yes", chimed in the other helper, busy sewing up a bale of pressed waste paper ready for the mill. "Did you hear about the dead rat we found? That’s one of the reasons we wear gloves now". She whistled cheerfully as she turned back to her sacking needle. "T’m afraid there wasn’t very much to see", apologised the sergeant, as she led me back past her little office. I gave an absent-minded denial. My heart was too full of admiration for those women in the waste paper depot who came back to their work week by week condemned to battle not only with lunch papers and vermin, but to fight a continuous struggle against their own housewifely instincts-which would of course suggest the copper fire. Civic responsibility has in them, I decided, reached its finest flowering.

M.

I.