Word: tinning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Tin Cans...
Having lately been taught to consider cans as valuable metal, Americans, as they emptied their soup, beans and tomatoes from tin containers last week, wanted to know: What to do with empty cans...
Many had written to Washington ("hundreds of thousands of letters," said one WPB official) demanding to know why, if the Government needed tin to replenish dwindling stockpiles, it didn't come and get it. WPB's Bureau of Industrial Conservation admitted that the long-delayed nationwide campaign to salvage tin would soon get under way, could not say when, how, where the detinning would be done. The only positive, encouraging word came from harassed metalmen themselves: detinning of used cans is a perfectly feasible if not profitable operation...
...Present tin cans are about 98.5% sheet steel, 1.5% tin. (A recent WPB order has reduced the tin content of future cans to 1.25%.) By washing and shredding the cans, then treating with caustic soda and other chemicals, it is possible to extract about 25 Ib. of tin oxide (readily smelted to a grade equivalent to Straits tin) per ton. The detinned sheet steel, once despised and used only for rough castings such as sash weights, is now in big demand by scrap-hungry steelmakers...
...other hand, the professor asserted, the defeat of Japan will be a decisive factor in a victory over Germany, since it will make available to the Allied powers such quantities of rubber, tin, petroleum and quinine as will tremendously strengthen our war effort. He stressed also that the defeat of Hitler, while Japan is still strong, might be followed by a noticeable divergence of purpose among the countries now opposed to Japan...