Curator's Choice: Salvage Saves Shipping

The beginning of a new year is a time for setting good intentions and with this in mind Senior Film Curator Jane Fish's archive highlight for January is an animated short about recycling.

Salvage Saves Shipping (1943)

Today we are concerned about recycling, single-use and carbon footprints, so it is interesting to remember the very necessary salvage campaigns of the British home front Second World War when every commodity was precious and needed to be re-used, recycled or rationed.

Our recently digitised film Salvage Saves Shipping (1943) is an entertaining and effective Ministry of Information public information film which delivers this important message in a clear, succinct and light-hearted manner in a cleverly constructed animated short.

Explore more wartime newsreel trailers online and available for licensing via IWM Film.

These short films were just one of the many ways that the Ministry of Information promoted campaigns to gather paper, metal, rubber and rags for re-use, to save food scraps for animal feed and to collect bones for production of glue, fertilizer and explosives. These campaigns were also highlighted in the newspapers, on the radio, in pamphlets and with striking posters.

© IWM (Art.IWM PST 14678)