Business: Brighter Steel

Last week steel production hit 101% of theoretical capacity. At the same time U.S. steelmasters breathed easier about the future. The 13,000 local salvage com mittee scrap drives so far have turned up 3.2 million tons, with still more to come.

By late spring 18 new blast furnaces will be in operation, giving the mills 6^ million tons more pig annually, or enough when added to their home scrap and what is turned back by steel-using industry, to meet all of next year’s needs.

Danger now is that local scrap collec tions may bog down because scrap dealers are receiving more metal than they can handle. When scrap piles in community dumping grounds do not move quickly, people who searched from attic to cellar for contributions may get disgusted with the whole drive. Actually dealers are ship ping scrap to the mills as quickly as pos sible and at a satisfactory rate. But deal ers are handicapped because the publicly collected scrap requires careful sorting (about 30% of the take thus far has been metal not suited for steelmaking — non-ferrous metals, galvanized zinc, brass, etc.) and under price ceilings for steel scrap, dealers cannot afford to bid high for labor to do the sorting and handling.