OTHER CHEMURGIC PROJECTS 



In the new Southern economy the mastic roofing 

 shingle is particularly interesting because World War 

 II compelled a switch from one waste to another and 

 encouraged the manufacturers to extract new values 

 out of their own by-products. As evidenced by Flint- 

 cote's big new plant, this nth degree of salvaging salvage 

 is successful. 



Asphalt shingles are built up of a feltlike sheet which 

 is impregnated with asphalt. The top surface is coated 

 with a layer of chips or granules of a nonflammable 

 material. Before 1938 the Flintcote plant in New Orleans 

 made its felt entirely out of rags; not the nice, clean 

 white linen rags that go into the finest writing papers, 

 but the very rag-tag of the secondhand dealers' stocks. 

 This lowest grade of all the discarded odds and ends of 

 the nation's fabrics was a high-grade raw material for 

 them. It made a fine, tough, absorbent base stock. It 

 was cheap, too, but about three-quarters of its cost was 

 the labor of collecting and the handwork of sorting. 

 When the ragman and the rag pickers went off into the 

 Army or to better-paid war jobs, this cheap raw material 

 advanced in price and even at higher prices began to 

 be scarce. Flintcote began working a little wood pulp 

 into their base stock. 



In their fine tradition of working up wastes, they did 

 not go out and buy only regular pulping logs, but began 

 to use as much as possible of the branches and trim- 

 mings of the neighboring lumbering operations. Their 



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