A History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-46
This section shows how many sorts of salvage are collected by housewives, and how regularly.
About half the housewives who collect salvage collected two to three sorts; about a third collected more than three sorts; one-tenth collected one sort, and the rest did not collect anything.
Collects nothing Collects one sort Collects 2-3 sorts Collects more than 3 sorts
Numbers: 225 353 1812 1153
There are very sharp local differences:-
Collects nothing Collects one sort Collects 2-3 sorts Collects more than 3 sorts
Numbers: 2 39 7 22 116 41 46 18
KEY: Best town Worst town
(Figures for each individual place are given in Appendix 3)
This table shows that in the higher income groups (A and B) a higher proportion than in the lower income groups (C and D) collects more than three types of salvage. In the section on paper salvage an attempt is made to analyse the reasons for the difference between social groups.
A and B | C and D | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
% | % | |||
Nothing collected | 30 | 3.9 | 180 | 7.8 |
1 sort collected | 55 | 7.2 | 265 | 11.5 |
2-3 sorts collected | 361 | 47.3 | 1210 | 52.3 |
More than 3 sorts collected | 318 | 41.6 | 658 | 28.4 |
No important age differences were found.
Housewives' responses were analysed according to whether they collected salvage “regularly”, “sometimes” or “never”.
Paper, food waste and metal are collected regularly by about three-quarters of the housewives in the sample, bones by less than half, rags by not quite one-tenth, and rubber by very few indeed.
Paper | Metal | Bones | Food | Rags | Rubber | |||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
78.7 | 7.0 | 14.3 | 71.7 | 12.2 | 16.1 | 42.0 | 11.4 | 45.6 | 71.5 | 4.2 | 24.3 | 9.5 | 13.3 | 77.2 | 3.2 | 8.2 | 83.6 | |
Regularly | Sometimes | Never |
In the following sections the situation for the different commodities is examined.
The analysis made of paper salvage supports conclusions which have a general application to all sections.