A CLEAN-UP CAMPAIGN

Northern Advocate, 23 August 1945, Page 4

A CLEAN-UP CAMPAIGN

THE Whangarei Borough Council is to be commended for its desire to help citizens to clean up their properties, and, incidentally, to clean up the town. In this connection, a rat extermination campaign was inaugurated this week. This is timely. There are few householders who do not have reason to know that rats and mice are present in unwelcome numbers. Owners of stores and industrial organisations are. particularly affected, while dumps of refuse of all kinds are infested with rodents. Rats and mice being notorious carriers of disease, their extermination is a matter of self-defence which householders should not neglect. The Borough Council is making poison available, and in many ways comprehensive methods are being suggested for wholesale war on rats and mice. The aggregate result should be good. It is most desirable that pests which multiply at an alarming rate should be wiped out, or reduced to the smallest proportions. In furtherance of the campaign against rats and mice, the Borough Council has provided facilities for householders to remove from their grounds rubbish which might harbour rats. An extra collection has been made by borough garbage trucks, and much rubbish removed already. This is all to the good, with the exception that many citizens would have been better advised if they had kept for composting a large quantity of hedge clippings, shrubs and greenstuffs of various kinds which have found their way to collecting trucks. The composting, or the cligging-in, of greenstuffs as a means of restoring to the soil some of the properties taken from it, is a practice long since adopted as the exercise of commonsense. However, apart from this consideration, the clean-up facilities which the Borough Council has offered to citizens cannot but have beneficial results. They should be utilised to the fullest extent by householders.