STERILIZATION 197 



[ighten the clay land, and reclaim the bogs, of Essex by plough- 

 \g in street sweepings from the City of London. 



2. Barging from Wharves and Carrying out to Sea. — Much 

 luisance is occasioned, both at the wharves and along the 

 ^oast : solid refuse in this respect is much worse than strained 



jwage. 



3. Sorting with a view to utilization — now less practised than 

 formerly. When the system was usual in London, for street 

 sweepings, of which some 2,000,000 tons are picked up annually, 

 each public authority required a large space for sorting, sifting, 

 and draining. Some thousands of tons were sent into the 

 country as manure ; but the nearest farms are a long way from 

 London, and manuring is done during the season of the year 

 when the amount of street sweepings is the lightest, therefore 

 an allowance of about 2s. per ton had to be made to the farmer 

 to pay the carriage. Even then all tins and glasses had to be 

 sorted out and barged away at a cost of about 4s. per ton. 

 London will produce on a wet day about a hundred times more 

 sloppy street sweepings than on a dry one. Before this could 

 be loaded into railway trucks it had to be drained for some 

 long time upon the depots, then to be picked up and carted 

 to the railway sidings at considerable expense. There was, 

 therefore, always a large stock of decomposing vegetable matter 

 on hand, and in many depots a mass of slop on the one side, 

 and perhaps forty women screening house refuse on the other. 



It is said that the town refuse of Paris, which is sys- 

 tematically collected and carefully sorted b}- chiffoniers, is worth 

 £2,000 per annum. Sardine and other tins are made into toys 

 and parts of tinware, while bottles, rags, etc., are more care- 

 fully utilized than in English dustyards.^ At Chelsea, for some 

 years, an attempt was made to work up the debris by machine- 

 sorting with graded sieves, using the fine ash for cement, or 

 mixed with the stones, bricks, and clinker as concrete ; the 

 breeze and cinders, with the assistance of a little coal, were 

 burnt as fuel for the boilers by which the machines were driven 

 and the works electrically lighted, while a special feature was 

 the manufacture on the spot of a coarse brown paper from the 

 paper and wood fragments. The thermal value of the breeze 



^ For details of a similar mode of collection at Leicester, and the prices 

 realized, see Allen's paper, Journal of the Sanitary Institute, vol. xxv., April, 1904. 

 In New York and Boston dry refuse, other than ashes, is sorted as it passes over 

 a moving platform, and only the worthless residue is burnt (Hering, Report of the 

 American Public Health Association, vol. xxii., p. 105). 



