The Committee employ in this department over 500 men, including clerks, inspectors, wheelwrights, smiths, saddlers, tinmen, engineers, mechanics, manure and mortar makers, stablemen, and labourers. They have 156 horses, and about the same number of vehicles of various descriptions.
When the loaded vans reach the yard, they are first weighed, afterwards they are taken on to the first floor of a two-storey building, where the dry refuse from the open part of each van is unloaded and shovelled on to sieves worked by steam power. By this arrangement the fine dust widely diffusing itself in its descent, falls on to the floor below, covering the contents of the pails, which are, at the same time, being emptied on to grids fixed in the floor. At one end of these grids the bars are set much more closely together than at the other, and serve to convey the liquid portion of the contents of the pails by means of troughs to a tank where it is further dealt with. The solid portion of the excreta falls through the wide-barred portion of the grid into suitable receptacles. The rough portion of the dry refuse, after being separated from the fine, is carried along a movable and endless table to the mortar mills, the boiler, or to one of the various furnaces, of which there are several in the yard. This dry refuse is of such a heterogeneous character as to require various modes of treatment. It is made up of paper, rats, meat tins, straw, cabbage leaves, onions, apples, turnips, fish bones, dead cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, fowls, brush heads, old boots, old books, knives, forks, spoons, children's toys, old hats, old bonnets, crinoline wires, umbrella frames, broken pots, broken bottles, preserve jars, medicine bottles, old mattresses, cinders, bits of coal, firewood, bass, broken bricks, and a host of other articles too numerous to mention. When this mass of rubbish is somewhat assorted, the cinders are separated and used for fuel for the boilers and furnaces (no coal whatever is allowed in the yard), the remaining portion of the rubbish along with some most vile and abominable matter which occasionally comes to the yard in the pails, is taken to the Carbonisers (of which there is a nest of eight in the yard), and the obnoxious material is therein carbonised and is resolved into a perfectly harmless material.
In another part of the yard is a second set of furnaces which are called destructors, and are used for the purpose of destroying rubbish, which before-time, for many years past, has been deposited in large heaps in every suburb of the city, to the great annoyance of the inhabitants whose fate it was to live in the vicinities of these deposits. These destructors not only consume this objectionable material, but they furnish heat to a concretor which is placed in close contiguity. The spent fuel is carted to the mills, and is there converted into mortar—a mortar, too, of the best description—as the samples of brickwork built with it and exhibited abundantly testify. This concretor, which is driven by steam power, is a large cylinder of a peculiar internal construction, which exposes an extensive evaporating surface to the heat from the destructor, which passes through the cylinder from end to end. The work of this concretor is to subject the urine or liquid portion of the contents of the pails fed by means of the troughs already spoken of in connection with the tank. The urine is pumped from this tank into the concretor at the rate of about 150 gallons per hour. The concentrated urine, which contains a large quantity of ammonia, is mixed with two-thirds its weight of charcoal, and the composition forms a most valuable manure.
The carboniser, the destructor, and the concretor have all been invented and patented by Mr. Alfred Fryer, of the firm of Manlove, Alliot & Co., engineers, Nottingham. The process of carbonising is patented by the Universal Charcoal Company, Limited, who are to receive a royalty, we understand, from the Health Committee for the use of their patent. There is a tall and noble-looking chimney in the centre of the yard surrounded by many new buildings and sheds, and this has been built with the concrete mortar manufactured by the Health Committee.
Such is the gigantic scale upon which these matters are dealt with in the City of Manchester.
The other methods, to which reference has been made, for the disposal of town refuse require no further comment, as it is evident that unless a ready sale for the refuse can be effected, by far the best method of disposing of it seems to be that by which it is completely annihilated by fire in the manner that has been described, or in some other similar manner.
Having thus far followed the house refuse from its first appearance in its cradle, the dustbin, through its chequered career after collection down to its decease, either by burial, or by cremation, the question of the cost of the whole of this work must be deferred until the final chapter, after I have dealt with the subject of street sweeping and cleansing, the removal of snow, and a short chapter upon street watering, which is somewhat analagous to scavenging, and is frequently included in the accounts of that work in the estimates which are prepared by a Local Authority.