Right Under Our Noses

Brought out into the open last week for all America to contemplate and yearn over and perhaps reach for was the biggest unused rubber hoard in the world.

That rubber hoard is right here in the U.S.—lying half under water along country streams, gathering dust in barns and attics and basements, hanging from apple trees for kids to swing on, making homemade flower pots for farmers’ front yards.

It includes perhaps half the. 900,000,000 tires the U.S. public has thrown away since World War I.

And rubbermen say it could very quickly be put to work easing the rubber shortage—if OPA would let the rubber reclaimers make it worth the junkman’s while to go out and gather it. At five times the present ceiling price, using this wasted rubber would still be by far the cheapest way to get rubber quickly.

How Much? The size of this precious stockpile of scrap is unknown: rabble rousers cry 10,000,000 tons, pessimists talk of only 500,000. But all rubbermen agree that by present shortage standards the tonnage lying uncollected is enormous.

And most guess that the U.S. has a rubber mine of as much as 2,000,000 tons of scrap, which is equivalent to 700,000 tons of crude (more than the U.S.’s total crude consumption last year).*

The rubber-reclaiming capacity of the U.S. is already 350,000 tons a year, which a new time-saving process announced by U.S. Rubber last week may increase somewhat. Goodrich President John L. Collyer told the Senate Truman Committee that during the first three months of this year scrap was collected at a rate equal to only 50% of capacity. Other rubbermen agree that, though low scrap collections have not yet cut down reclaiming operations, they soon will.

Mixed with two-thirds natural rubber, scrap makes good enough rubber for even most Army and Navy specifications; mixed with 2% natural rubber it might make a tire that civilians could drive 5,000 miles.

It is cheap to turn scrap back into usable rubber (with about a 50% loss in resiliency); scrap does not suffer much from lying about for years on end. Scrap rubber probably accounts for an important part of Germany’s rubber supplies.

Chicken Feed. Why scrap rubber is not more fully used in the U.S. is perhaps the strangest paradox in the whole war effort. The rubber shortage is so acute that even penny-pinching Jesse Jones is ready to risk $850,000,000 or more on a vast synthetic-rubber expansion that will not produce 1,000,000 tons until 1944. The cost of that synthetic rubber will be at least 25¢ a pound, or $500 a ton. Yet the basic price ceiling on scrap rubber has been held down month after month to the pre-Pearl Harbor figure of only $18 a ton.

That means that an old tire (and 80% of the U.S. scrap supply normally comes from tires and tubes) still brings only 18¢ delivered to the factory, and practically nothing to the owner.

Even if every U.S. citizen patriotically offered the Government his worn-out tires for nothing, that kind of chicken feed makes it impossible for him to use the U.S.’s junk-collection system to get it to market. The aluminum-scrap drive—whose painful and recent memory makes citizens wonder whether scrap drives are worth the effort—showed that only experienced junkmen can make a scrap drive work.

U.S. junkmen are no bigtime entrepreneurs: whatever their patriotism, they cannot afford to work for $1 a year; and much of the rubber scrap lies in out-of-the-way places, in small quantities, in widely separated rural areas, costly and time-absorbing to reach.

Moreover, even if scrap rubber went as high as $100 a ton—about twice the figure most scrap men cite as a good incentive price, but only a third of its $280 peak in World War I—the cost of collecting 1,000,000 tons would be less than one-eighth the cost of just getting started on synthetic production. Synthetic rubber in quantity is still prime insurance for a long war, but it is no good to the war effort now.

Get the Scrap. Many straws in the wind last week showed that the Government is beginning to see how penny-wise and pound-foolish its scrap ceiling was. Jesse Jones told Congress that he was working with WPB and OPA on a get-the-scrap program which includes an expansion of reclaiming capacity as well as incentive prices and requisitioning from hoarders.

Scrap rubbermen were a dime a dozen in Washington all week long, and they were getting a serious hearing behind many doors hitherto tightly closed to them.

But even 2,000,000 tons of ancient scrap are not likely to do the civilian user much good. Collecting them might well save him from having his present tires commandeered, might even let some people get their tires recapped. But, despite the President, no one outside the war effort will get a new tire for the duration.

*Typical conversions: one 20-lb. tire is equal to 6 lb. of crude rubber; 100 lb. of inner tube equals 67 lb. of crude; 100 lb. of hot-water bottle is 57 lb. of crude. Other scrap-to-crude ratios: rubber gloves 10-8; bathing caps and shoes 10-6 ; rubber heels, 10-2.