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FEDERAL WORKS AGENCY Work Projects Administration For Release Fr~day, August 14, 1942 WPA employees, scouring back roads of the farm country and extract_ine; abandoned rails from city streets, have turned up 100,000 tons of scrap metal for the production of war :implement.s. Reporting today on the collection, Brigadier General Philip B. Fleming, Federal Works Administrator and Acting Commissioner of Work Projects, urged greater utilization of the WPA orcanization by State and local salvage committees during their coming National Scrap Harvest . Only by such cooperation, he said, can the full force of HPA manpower be put to work on the gathe·ring of salvage material in rural areas. The report disclosed that since the drive for rural scrap becan in April more than 54,000 tons of metal had been gathered through July by WPA crews cooperating with salvage officials and using WPA or local ·government trucks. Recently the Army has turned over to WPA for scrap collection more than 100 former CCC trucks. In addition, between last October and the end of ~1nne , 44,900 tons of steel rails were removed from city streets through WPA. projects under agreement with city governments to ship the rails to points designat'3d by the War Production Board . The rural scrap has been collected under a nation-wide WPA oroject sponsored by the Conservation Division of the War Production Board and operated in conjunction with the Department of .Agri culture and the State salvage offices of the WPB. The car rails hav2 been removed in part through regular locally-sponsored Hn. str,::?et projects and to an increasinc; extent through the nation-wide c ollection project. "Each wook the amount of scrap metal gathered by WPA crows has increased, even though the WPA rolls havo ooon declining, 11 General Fleming said. 11 ThJ WPA is prepared to put more and more men to work in connection with tho National Scrap Harvest , which will bo conducted under tho guidance of the War Production Board wh,m the farmers have complotod the agricultural harvest. "The extent of our contribution to thG country's scrap metal pilo , howovor, depends on the willingnoss of States and communities to call in ,the WP.A . Only wh,.m thero are specific requests, through tho State salvage offices of th0 WPB, can WPA s0nd its workers and oquipm,.:mt into tho country to forrot out scrap which otherwise is lost to war production. "Tho necessity of bringing out tho old metal which r'-omains off tho ostablishGd routes o.f junk collection, or lies buried in city stroots and cannot bo r JmovGd economically by city governments, has boon clearly stat-Jd by tho conservation officials of tho :far Production Board. Thi3y havo estim,:7-. kd thcJ.t 17,000,CJ00 tons of steel must bo reclaimed from all sources during thG r 2st of this year, and th:w havo stated that in many communities the WPA is tho only organization r eadily available to cut, load and move old metal on its way to the mills. 11 Digitized by NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY (Ovor) Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 4-2322 - 2- ' In tho week ended July 28, WPA' s scrn.p motal collection from agricultural s ources amounted to 7,500 tons, the largest weekly h aul since the program began. Thirty-three States are now participating to a varying extent, depending on the requests of local salvage officials. They have provided, in addition to t he metal, 2,400 tons of scrap rubber and quantities of other salvace material. The potential quantity of rural scrap which can be collected nationally by the WPA has been demonstrated in Mississippi, where salvage officials have made the fullest use of WPA 1 s manpower and equipment. :More than one-sixth of the WPA employees in the State are engaged in this work. Mississippi has provided n early one-fourth of the national WPA rural scrap colle cti on to date, with more than 15,Soo tons of metal salvaged through July. With 300 tons coming in each day aboard more than 200 trucks, it is estimated that more than 90 percent of the available scrap in the State will be in by the end of the year . Second to the Mississippi collection was that of Wisconsin, where 10,Soo tons of metals were brought in by WPA crews which took over the collection after two other drives had been conducted. Oklahoma and Michigan followed with more. than 4,100 tons each. As with farm scrap, the salvaeing of old car r ails has been steppod up in recent weeks, nearly 30 percent of the nine month total having been removed in June. Rail removal has now been r eported in 34 States since last October, with Ohio producing 10,500 tons in that period and Massachusetts and Indiana followinc with 3,100 tons each. Northern California has provided 2,900 tons, Upstate lJ,3w York 2,600 tons, and Iowa and Kentucky 2,400 tons each . During June, Ohio yic~lded 2, 800 tons, Hassachusetts 1,600, and trichigan 1,250. About ten percent of tho scrap me tal colle cted in rural areas was donated, some of it having been doposited by the contributors th ,:ms elvos in scrap bins ,sot up and emptied periodically by WPA. The r e st was paid fo r from a fund set up for this purpose by the Metals Rese rve Company of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In some instances tho rails r emoved by WPA wore first purchased by the ERC, thus establishing the public ownership necessary for r emoval by the WPA . Digitized by Original from NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
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