Given an increasing wartime shortage of tin, his team also commenced investigations into the production of titanium tetrachloride from local resources as an alternative material to replace stannic (tin) chloride in a number of applications. Previously prepared overseas by chlorinating titanium white pigment (titanium dioxide), McTaggart's work demonstrated that the potential expense of proposals to import titanium white could be avoided through development of his process in which rutile sand, briquetted with coal or charcoal, was chlorinated directly. At first operated on a pilot-plant scale with Australian rutile sand replacing titanium pigment, the process was adopted for large-scale manufacture.