COLLIERIES AND GRASS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19171, 10 November 1925, Page 7

COLLIERIES AND GRASS.

COAL WITHOUT SLAG-HEAPS.

DISPOSAL OF RUBBISH.

FOUNDATION FOR PASTURES.

If one stands on the railway platform of Dixon Fold, a small station between Manchester and Bolton, he will see a colliery, the property of the Clifton and Kearslev Coal Company, at the foot of a slight declivity. Something unaccustomed about the pile of buildings may cause the visitor to wonder. Two tall stacks, the usual pithead buildings, the frame of the winding machine—there is

: a neatness and compactness about it all that it strange. Then it is realised what is the matter with this colliery. There i are no slag-heaps!

| In the direction of Bolton, and down : in the valley there is a pleasant stretch of meadow—rather more than thirty acres , of it. Cattle and sheep and horses are grazing there, and a few ducks in possession move across the green. A barn with • a corrugated red roof houses a store of ! hay, and where the stretch of meadow

ends, the land rises a little in a wooded slope. An agreeable substitute for a slagheap, it will be thought. The visitor goes on to ask' But where is the slag-heap, for rubbish in considerable bulk there

must be where coalmining is going on. Well, the field the observer has been admiring is the slag-heap, or rather the slag-flats. It has never been allowed to become a heap. As the cinders and " pit dirt " and refuse from the washery became available for disposal, they were spread out here with a carpet of earth above then. In due course they became what one sees to-day. How it is Done.

A representative of , the Manchester Guardian had a conversation about the work recently with Mr. Daniel Thompson, who for many years has had this and

much other work in hand for the Clifton and Kearsley Company. Mr. Thompson said that 35 years had passed since

it was first decided to spread the slag out

and cover it over instead of following the usual custom of piling it into an unsightly heap. It was slow work, and the rate of progress had been roughly an acre a year.

It happened that the site chosen for disposing of the rubbish was a depression in the land, and this was extremely

favourable to the carrying out of the scheme. Had it been a case of building up instead of dipping down the matter would have been more difficult and more costly. Even as it was, and granted the favourable disposition of the land chosen for the purpose, this turning of the earth over upon a slag deposit was not a "commercial proposition " The way the thing was done, Mr. Thompson said, was this. The slag was carried out and dumped into the depression to a depth of about 30 or 40 feet. Then the earth at the foot of the slope this created was carried up to the top and laid over the slag to a depth of about two feet. Then upon this skinned portion of the earth the pping was continued, and so the process went on. It would be very costly. Mr. Thompson pointed out, to spread the slag over a shallow depth, because thus an an enormous amount of ground would be required to dispose of a small quantity of slag. That was why, in considering the economics of the matter, a depression was the most desirable place for disposing of the rubbish. Productive New Ground.

Mr. Thompson thought that to dispose of slag by heaping it up and then again conveying earth to the platform thus created would be, financially, an almost impossible task, and as to the prospect of levelling away the massive slag-heaps that already exist he was quite pessimistic. The task, he said, must be begun from the beginning, and even then it was a question whether a company was prepared to admit the work as a yearly charge upon profits. Once the thing had been carried through in the way it had been done at Dixon Fold, it was possible to grow any sort of crops upon the land so created. The same process, he said, had been carried through at other collieries of the Clifton and Kearsley Company. About 15 or 16 acres of If>nd had been dealt with at the Wetearth Pit, seven or eight acras at the Robin Hood collierv, and a smaller extent at the Astley Colliery.