A BIG TASK.

Waipa Post, Volume XXI, Issue 1312, 2 November 1922, Page 2

A BIG TASK.

KEEPING LONDON CLEAN. COLLECTION OF REFUSE. Keeping London clean is a verj costly business. People, seeing the household rubbish thrown into the dustbin, never think that it will cost the local authority more than 5d per hundredweight to remove it! Every year 1| million tons of refuse are gathered up from London's 117 square miles of streets and houses. Or, to put it in another way, 5000 tons per day. But you must re member that there are 4| million people within the boundaries of administrative London. The collection and disposal of such an enormous amount of rubbish from the streets and houses is a gigantic work, especially when it is remembered that 29 different local authorities are responsible for it, and that there is no co-ordination in the work. Each authority goes about the business in its own way without the slightest regard for its ,next door neighbour. The vehicles used in this very ne cessary service are 1204 single horse vans, 38 pair horse vans; 61 motoi lorries and 17 trailers, or- 1320 in all. Owing to the large number of authorities concerned and their varying methods of collecting and getting rid of the rubbish, the cost is difficult to discover. But inquiries recently made show that the average cost of disposal, exclusive of the cost of collecting, is 8s per ton. Thus it costs London £600,000 per annum, or, to put it another way, £2OO per day, to dispose of its dust. Investigations show that 26 per cent of the rubbish thrown away is fuel. In every 100 tons of rubbish there are 26 tons of good fuel. Most of it is at present being thrown on to dust heaps and wasted. Many tons of glass, bones, bottles, crockery and metals are thrown away every year. All these have a saleable value and if they were sorted out by the local authorities the effect would be really to reduce the cost of keeping London clean. Southwark, by adopting means to sort out the useful articles in its ruhbish and subsequently selling them, has reduced the net cost of disposing of its refuse to 3s 6d per ton, against the average of 8s per ton for tor the whole of London.

By careful attention to the most up-to-date and scientific methods the cost of collecting and disposing of refuse can be reduced by thousands of pounds a year.