SALVAGING ARMY HATS IN FRANCE.
This photo was taken at Tours, France, 1 February, 1918.
SALVAGING ARMY SHOES IN FRANCE.
Picture taken at Tours in March, 1918, showing a few shoes worn out by the soldiers overseas.
Army laundry activity was in charge of three New York laundrymen: J. E. Dann, president of the Pilgrim Laundry, of Brooklyn, and his assistants, William Longfelder, of H. Kohnstamn & Co., and E. D. Tribbett, of the American Laundry Machinery Co.
Wherever possible waste materials were reclaimed for use by the Army instead of being sold as junk. This was particularly true of bags and burlap. Hundreds of thousands of bags and great quantities of burlap furnished by the salvage division were utilized for army purposes. Without salvage, all of this would have been thrown away or sold at junk prices. When the fighting ended the base salvage plant at Chicago was being equipped to repair about 15,000 bags daily.
The purpose of garbage separation was threefold—the reduction of mess waste, the increase in revenue to the Government, and the recovery of glycerine contents for military purposes. Before the war with Germany the Army regulations required the burning of garbage at camps. When the great training camps were established, the Government adopted generally the policy of selling garbage to contractors, except at Camps Fremont, Hancock, McClellan, Sevier, and Shelby, where it was incinerated. Originally contracts had been let on a per-man basis, the contracts extending for several months, comparable to municipal contracts for the disposal of garbage. Later on, however, the policy was adopted of letting contracts for periods of one month only, since the number of men at the camps was continually increasing, and the garbage grew correspondingly bulkier. It is estimated that this change in contracting saved the Government considerably over $400,000. Contract sale prices ranged from 1 cent to 9 cents per man per month, the latter price in most cases including the manure from the stables.
With a view to obtaining glycerine, the War Department authorized the construction of 16 garbage-rendering plants at the larger concentration centers, but only one, that at Camp Lee, was actually constructed, since it was determined later by an investigation of our national resources that the amount of glycerine to be obtained in this manner did not justify the expenditure of the money. Also the project of establishing piggeries at camps was abandoned, after investigation by the salvage service, since it would have required 18 months to clear the investment, and in the meantime the Government would have been deprived of revenue from the sale of garbage.