Is it true that most of the metal collected from civilians during WW II was not used in the war effort?
Many tons of scrap metal were collected to be used, the govenment said, to make the tanks, guns and planes needed by our troops. But some have said that this metal was mostly useless for military purposes. Was it just a program to make the folks at home feel that were helping out or did it have a military purpose?
Where can I find more information?
Thanks
tin cans might not have been made into tanks though the military did consume lots of tin cans.
even if scrap wasn’t used directly it allows more steel to go to military needs.
The tin cans could have been melted down along with other scrap to produce ‘pot metal’ that would have been used to make light duty parts like door handles, or for filler material. So almost of the metal could have found some use.
I met a used forklift dealer who liked to keep very old forklifts in his warehouse, making it a sort of forklift historical museum. He noted that finding pre-WWII forklifts was nearly impossible because so many of them had been scrapped for the war effort, even though they were often just replaced with new units that usually used more steel.
I;ve heard that after the war, old equipment was sometimes sent to ‘graveyards’ instead of recycled to prevent flooding the market with low cost metal. I guess that kept the price of plowshares high.
Cecil’s above-linked article says, “only virgin aluminum could be used to manufacture aircraft.” I don’t understand this. Virgin aluminum doesn’t exist in nature: aluminum has to be extracted from ore. My naive impulse is to think that refining commercial aluminum to a “virgin” state would be cheaper than starting from ore. Does commercial aluminum have a contaminate that cannot be easily extracted?
(And while I’m at it: Why does my recycling literature tell me that newspaper cannot be recycled if it’s contaminated with food products? Don’t trees contain all kinds of beetle grubs, squirrel toes, and other non-treelike contaminates?)
there are dozens and dozens alloys of aluminum, they can’t be mixed without compromise to the metal. it may have referred to the fact that the high quality metal needed from recycling at that time.
recycling aluminum is much cheaper than getting from ore.
Steel can be remelted and reused, easily. There’s a little company (Nucor Steel) that does just that. Copper and copper alloys (bronze, brass) can be remelted and reused. Lead is 100% recyclable.
Paper can be reused, but the economics of it are dubious.
Aluminum is perfectly recyclable.
I’d say the WWII scrap drives were very effective.
There is a Nucor plant in our state, and at one time they were one of our customers. It was amazing to watch them turn all of that scrap metal that came in by the rail car load into high quality rebar.
that should read
it may have referred to the fact that the high quality metal needed couldn’t be obtained from recycling at that time.
I sure hope it was used. I spent a lot of time as a Boy Scout collecting loads of aluminum cookware, which was not all that comman back then, for the war effort. I’ll be pissed if it all ended up in some scrap heap.
Thank you all.
Nice to have a spot like this to help answer all types of questions.
Pure aluminum is perfectly recyclable.
Most aluminum is alloyed with various other metals though, and you can’t economically separate metals that are alloyed together. So if you pile all of the “aluminum” scrap together, you’ve got a mix of different alloys with different properties. Melt them all together and the resulting alloy isn’t any good for high performance applications. You can make pots out of it, but not airplane parts.
You can sort your pile of aluminum scrap into crude piles: tubing and sheet in one pile, castings in another, and low-quality pots and the like in yet another pile. Melting down each pile separately helps somewhat, but you’ll still end up with a fairly indeterminate alloy that’s not optimal for any single purpose. That pile of sheet and tubing will probably melt down into an alloy that can be made into new low-quality tubing suitable for deck chairs, but it won’t be good enough to make aircraft frames. The pile of mixed castings can be turned into new aluminum alloy castings of some sort (maybe for your lawnmower engine), but the resulting alloy won’t be good enough for an aircraft engine.
If you can collect scraps that are all the same alloy (offcuts from a factory for example) those can be easily recycled into new material.
Wiki has an overview of the dizzying array of aluminum alloys.
Yes, and as mentioned in passing, the aircraft manufacturers of WWII really wanted duralumin, what we call today the 2000 series. 2024 is one such alloy used in major aircraft structures, and it has a specific mix of elemental components (0.50% silicon, 0.50% iron, 3.8–4.9% copper, 0.30–0.9% manganese, 1.2–1.8% magnesium, 0.10% chromium, 0.25% zinc, 0.15% titanium). Alloying pure aluminum that you produced from bauxite to these tolerances is not merely feasible, it’s what happens every day.
Collecting your mix of 1000-series pots and pans and screen doors and trying to produce duralumin means you can’t just melt it down and reform it into whatever structure you wanted. You could try to separate out all the alloying elements so you have pure aluminum and then put back in the ones you want. That means a lot of extra steps, each of which requires more time, money, and energy investment. In the context of trying to get US industry into supporting a massive re-armament drive, these were all in short supply. You could try to do a detailed metallurgical analysis of the resulting melt and then just adjust that, but what do you do about the lead, vanadium, gallium, and other elements that you don’t want at all?
“Perfectly” is a judgment call. If you’re recycling old aluminum into the same product, such as soda and beer cans into more soda and beer cans, then yes, the statement is correct. If you’re trying to recycle car bumpers into door panels, there may be some slight tweaking, but on the whole, not a big problem It you’re trying to turn beer and soda cans into an F-35 (or even a P-38), then: big problems. Are those problems technically feasible to overcome? Yes. Are they practical or economical to overcome? Probably not.
So while Cecil’s statement may have been an oversimplification, it was in essence correct.
In Britain, most of the aluminium pots and pans collected weren’t used in aircraft because it would have taken up too much resources to convert it. All the iron railings removed weren’t used either. It was all a ploy to boost morale so all the housewives and so felt they were contributing to the war effort. Fact is most of the iron railings were loaded on barges and dumped into the Thames estuary or the Solent. Some ended up in the channel.
This information came from dockers in Canning Town in 1978 who had worked during the war on ‘lighters’ that were towed down the Thames estuary to dump vast quantities of scrap metal and decorative ironwork. They claimed that so much was dumped at certain spots in the estuary that ships passing the area needed pilots to guide them because their compasses were so strongly affected by the quantity of iron on the sea-bed."
Scrap-drive aluminum probably wasn’t used in aircraft, for reasons mentioned above - but I seriously doubt it was dumped. Mixed alloy or “garbage” aluminum can still be used to make anything from canteens to tubing, and had and has intrinsic value. The products made from it now did not require virgin Aluminum, which in turn could be used to make aircraft - or at least did not need to be imported.
As to steel, most steel at the time came from integrated mills, and not much of it was alloyed all that exotically, so it must have been usable for a lot of applications. Even now, which much scrap steel having higher intrinsic Cu and other inclusions, you can make perfectly fine rebar out of it.
I wondering the same point. Is it really more economical to extract pure aluminum out of ore than out of scrap metal?
Quite possibly, due to the heterogenous nature of most scrap. If all your new ore is coming from one source, you can tailor the smelting process to remove just the impurities found in that one source and get the benefits of economy of scale. With scrap aluminum, there’s potentially a wide variety of impurities which may have to be removed by an equal number of different processes. And each batch is potentially different, so you have to run tests on each one to determine which processes to use. All this adds up to time and expense that is avoided by a single-source smelter.
How does one remove the other metals from an aluminum alloy? Off the top of my head I can’t think of any decent way…
My WAG is that you could melt the mass and let them separate by weight. Or maybe add something that will cause an unwanted metal to precipitate out.
Well, one thing is that the aluminum refineries are located where electricity is cheap, and that’s not necessarily where the scrap metal ends up. It can cost you more to get the scrap to the foundry than it’s worth.