Business & Finance: Get the Junk Man

U.S. housewives wondered last week why their aluminum pots and pans, given to their Government six weeks ago, were still stacked high around courthouses and fire stations. To satisfy them, the Office of Civilian Defense announced that 6,700,000 Ib. of the estimated 14,000,000 collected had “moved toward defense production.” By “moved,” OCD meant allocated to specific smelters. Actually only a fraction of this amount had been taken away.

Last July, when bustle-bottomed Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia waddled into the aluminum drive as head of OCD, rangy Bob McConnell of OPM’s conservation division already had a plan. It called for collection of the scrap by local committees, its sale to junk dealers who would sell it to the smelters. But the Little Flower did not trust junk dealers. Too many already were bootlegging aluminum-utensil scrap for as high as 40¢ a pound (Leon Henderson’s ceiling: 12¢).

So LaGuardia proposed that the local committees sell direct to the smelters. The Mayor also wanted the smelters to pay a fixed price for the scrap, plus freight charges. All the money was to go unmarked to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund.

The Mayor won, but his victory was short-lived. Last month when the “pots and pans” started to move to the smelters many another thing went along with them: old iron, rubber tires, whole refrigerators, baby carriages and bicycles. Some of the items, baby carriages for example, had only two ounces of aluminum in 50 pounds of bulk. The smelters screamed because they had to pay freight on stuff they could not use; in addition had to pay men to cull the aluminum, a job usually done by the junk man. Worse still, the smelters began to run out of storage space. In relation to its bulk, some of the scrap yielded only one-third the expected aluminum.

The smelters agreed to pay 11.5¢ a pound for the scrap, but meanwhile Alcoa has announced that on Sept. 30 the price of virgin aluminum will be reduced from 17¢ to 15¢ a pound. Fearing that Leon Henderson will make a similar reduction (from 17¢) in his ceiling on secondary aluminum (made from scrap), the scrap smelters—mostly smallish businesses—are jittery about being squeezed between the price they have to pay and their selling price.

Meanwhile in cities, where piles of scrap still blight city halls, mayors began to scream too. But McConnell, surveying the mess he did not make, was still remarkably optimistic. Allowing for baby carriages, he still hopes to get 8,400,000 Ib. of aluminum out of the 14,000,000 Ib. of scrap collected. Estimated Army, Navy, Lend-Lease and “essential” civilian requirements in 1942: 1,400,000,000 Ib.