The Birmingham age-herald., 1921-04-18
For Good of
 the Community

NIOIHlTNI IS more ungdnly, dWk- IN ward, more forbidding to the eye than furnace slag pile. Once it stood for nothing but ugliness. The slag pile at Alice furnace at one time provided point of precarious vantage for free sight of the baseball games when played at West End In the old days that was about the only service rendered
 They did use slag for railroad ballast, but that was about all. Then they made road foundations of it. After while they came along and converted it into concrete that is used for slow-setting pur poses.
 Then the Tennessee company out at Ensley took the open hearth steel furnace slag and crushed it and made of it a phos- phate for enrichment of the soil. This slag comes from a furnace mixture pre- pared with special view to the ultimate content, but 1t is slag just the same.
 Now they take this slag and make of it a beautiful face brick and a tile that shows irridescent hues. It is beautiful and hard and waterproof, durable and attractive to the eye. The slag is mixed with concrete in the making of the brick and the tile and has the qualities of con- crete with those of iron.
 Corporations have been formed to deal in nothing but slag. They have huge steam shovels and derricks and immense crushers installed hard by the sag piles and they eat into the slag piles by the tens of tons at a time The ungaln- ly and irregular mass IS pounded and ground into sizes to suit and even into powder
 It is long way from the slag that is laid for railroad ballast to the small grains of it that are neatly bagged and sold in the market for grit for the craWs of chickens. It is still longer way to the gorgeous-tinted tiling that is the lat est product.
 A former waste is great industry With it we are building railroad rights of way, city and county highways, making fertilizers and fabricating material for the homes of the land. The hideousness of the slag pile is transformed into smooth boulWards, the growing of fruits and flowers, into family rooftrees and the foundations of lordly structures.
 As the use of slag grows the size of the pile will decrese It will not cucumber the ground and mar the landscape. 1t will not be drain on the blast furnace to dispose of it. In fact, it is not drain now Where the furnaces were wont to give it away to have 1t moved, the slag is now source of revenue.
 Out at the Trussville furnace they have a magnet in connection with the slag-us- ing machinery, which draws out the parti- cles of iron remaining in the slag. These particles are collected and disposed of to the scrap dealer. It is understood that the income derived from this source has saved the cost of operation of the steam shovels at the slag pit
 Peans have been sung to the closed coke oven and to the manifold uses of the coal tar products whose salvage is made possible by the closed oven. The slag pile is also coming into it's own and proving boon instead of an annoyance to human ity. Nothing is being lost at blast fur naces and steel mills now.
 Birmingham homes are doing their cooking with gas coming from the by product plant of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron company and rooms in homes are being heated by this gas It is mak- ing electricity to operate mines and drive furnace machinery.
 No columns of smoke lie heavily over the land hardby the Sloss-Sheffield city furnaces and the absence of the smoke