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DISPOSAL OF SEWAGE AND TOWN REFUSE. 



By COUNCILLOR PARKINSON, March 20th, 1888. 



After explaining what is included in the name Sewage and 

 shewing that the practice of storing human waste near dwellings, 

 whether in stone tanks, pot tanks, pails or earth closets, is wrong 

 in principle, and a fruitful source of nuisance and disease, the 

 reader remarked that water carriage to some outside place 

 appears to be the future permanent method of removal, and the 

 various recently patented self-flushing waste-water closets seem 

 to offer an economical carrier. What then is to be done with it ? 

 Seaport towns have suffered from the discharge of sewage into 

 the sea, and inland towns have been compelled by the Local 

 Government Board and Eivers Pollution Commissioners to cease 

 polluting our streams with untreated Sewage. 



The main object in the treatment of Sewage is to prevent this 

 matter being a nuisance, or a disease propagator. Another aim is 

 as far as possible to utilize the known valuable manurial elements 

 contained therein. Theoretically the value of crude Sewage as a 

 manure according to Hoffman, Tidy, and Denton, &c., is about 

 2d. per ton ; this would represent £10,000 a year to Burnley, 

 and several million pounds to London. In practice it may be 

 said that in all cases that this mine of wealth does not pay for 

 the cost of working, and the attempts to extract the phosphates 

 and ammonia, &c., have not as yet been commercially successful. 

 Lieut. -Col. Hope, Bailly Denton and others have advocated and 

 laid out farms in Romford, Eugby, Birmingham, Barnsley, &c., 

 upon which crude Sewage is received. The liquid passes through 

 the soil, and the sohds are dug in, but in nearly all cases the 

 cost is out of all proportion to the crops reaUsed, and the land 

 becomes sewage-sick unless great skill is brought to bear in 

 rotation of crops and giving occasional rest to the land. The 

 smell from these farms is a constant nuisance, and crude sewage 

 farming has been declared a failure. Col. Hope, tlie father of 

 crude sewage farming, himself says " For many reasons the 

 heaviest solids ought to be taken out before the Sewage is dis- 

 tributed over the land, and their extraction should be made 

 compulsory by Act of Parliament." The Parliamentary Committee 

 on the Birmingham Sewerage Bill in 1872 allowed the Bill to 

 pass on the express condition that " No Sewage be put upon 

 any land without having been previously defcEcated in tanks." 



Experiments of all kinds have been tried, freezing and heating, 

 concentration and dilution, oxidizing and deoxidising, ferments 

 and preventers of fermentation ; electrization and magnetism ; 



