Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Factory refuse, instead of being allowed to pollute the waters, should be turned to good use by extracting the chemicals, which form valuable by-products. All farm waste should be taken to a remote part of the farm, placed in an open shed or vat with cement floor and screened from flies to form a compost heap for fertilizers for the farm. This will amply repay the extra trouble and expense by increasing the farm crops. The sooner such refuse, especially manure, is returned to the land, the more valuable it is as a fertilizer.

In cities the sewage should be disposed of in such a way as to yield a profit to the city, and also promote the health of the people. The sewage of a city of 100,000 people is supposed to be worth, in Germany, about $900,000 a year for fertilizer on account of the phosphorus it contains. The city of Berlin operates large sewage farms, using as laborers men condemned to the workhouse. The expense for land and sewer system was $13,000,000, but it pays for the money invested, with $60,000 yearly profit over all expenses.

On the other hand the cost of impure water to the city of Pittsburg was reckoned at $3,850,000, and in the city of Albany, New York, the annual loss was estimated at $475,000.

In the early settlement of our country all towns were built on streams, and the ones which grew and flourished were all on rivers large enough to carry commerce by boat. After the invention of steamboats, daily packet lines were run on all the principal rivers.

Albert Gallatin planned a complete system of improved waterways, including many canals, that was intended to establish a great commercial route. Many canals were built and put into actual operation and dozens of others had been planned, when the building of railways began. This new system of transportation at once became popular. Not only were no more canals dug and no more steamboat lines built, but many of those actually in operation were abandoned.

In order to encourage railroad building and develop new regions, the government has given land and money to the extent of hundreds of millions of dollars, until now the railroads form one-seventh of all our national wealth, having 228,000 miles of tracks and earning $2,500,000,000 each year, while the waterways owned by the government have fallen into disuse.

Within the last four or five years another change has come about in the general attitude toward the waterways. At the time that the crops are moved in the fall, and when coal is needed for the winter supply, there are not nearly enough cars in the country to handle the volume of business, neither are there enough locomotives to move the necessary cars, nor tracks, nor stations. In short, the railways are entirely unable to handle the vast products of the country during the busiest seasons. Many persons in the West have suffered for fuel, and commerce has been greatly checked by the shortage; and the situation is growing worse each year as production increases.

James J. Hill estimates that the cost of equipping the railroads to carry the commerce of the country would be from five to eight billion dollars. This means a heavy tax on iron and coal and timber as well as on the labor resources of the country, and it would then be only a question of time until still further extensions were needed.

With these facts in view, interest in the waterways of the country has been revived.

It is estimated that it will require five hundred million dollars, or fifty million dollars a year for ten years completely to improve the waterways of the country. This is not more than one-tenth of what would be needed to equip the railroads. The cost of carrying freight by rail is from four to five times that of carrying it by water.