Re-cycling - 1950/60s style.

This fleet of little electric three-wheelers were made by the Brush Company who manufactured electric vehicles. It is painted in East Ham's early cream livery with the coat of arms on the front.  Household vegetable waste was placed in the small galvanised pales - several of which are seen here. The pig-waste was emptied into the hold; paper and light cardboard - like the corn flakes box seen in the bundle on the pavement  - were put into the deep sacks slung from a metal frame at the rear of the vehicle. Having electric motors,these vehicles  were quiet and clean in the streets. When back at the yard, the hold could be tipped up and the contents ejected from doors at the rear of the vehicle. It rather looks as if the section of flagged paving has been recently renewed.

Footnote: keeping pigs during the war was not uncommon. A group of families in a street would club together to buy a pig, which was fattened up then sent for slaughter and butchered - each family receiving a share of the meat. Similar arrangements were sometimes made among the workforces of factories or at railway depots, where a few pigs might be kept penned on a small piece of unused land for the same purpose.