DUST AND HOUSE REFUSE:
SHOWING WHAT BECOMES OF IT.
If any of our readers are in the habit of passing a contractor’s or town’s yard, he will, perhaps, remember perceiving, alongside the outer walls, a busy scene going on, which he cannot exactly make out. A crowd of women toiling and moiling amid heaps of rubbish, two or three barges laden with vegetable refuse, he can distinguish plainly enough; but it is not until he sees a string of dustcarts slowly wending their way towards the distant wharf, that the thought flashes upon his mind that the busy human ants he has been watching are scavengers, sorting and arranging the refuse of the great towns and cities. There is nothing particularly attractive in a scavenger’s yard: neither the sights nor the smells are pleasant; nevertheless, the scene that here meets his eye, repellent as it is, could not exist in any other than a high state of civilisation. When we think of it, the dustbin is the tomb of the householder; it is the grave into which all our domestic surroundings inevitably sink. Of old, in the ruder states of society, this dust and refuse found its final rest in mother earth; but with us, its removal by the scavenger is only the first stage of its elevation to a higher existence, if we may so speak. In detail, as it exists in every household, it is a nuisance to be got rid of; in the aggregate, it becomes a valuable commodity, to be re-imported into our arts and manufactures.
As the great lumbering carts arrive in a dust-contractor’s yard, their contents are emptied into isolated heaps. No sooner does this take place, than they are each in detail attacked by grimy men, who remove all the larger articles, such as vegetable matter, old coal-scuttles, old crinolines—or rather crinolettes—old hats, and old garments. This is a kind of rough sifting which prepares the heap for the attacks of the women, who instantly settle upon every heap like a flock of crows that may happen to spy any carrion in a field. Each woman as she settles upon the heap comes sieve in hand, and spreads around her a number of baskets; the man now fills the sieve, and the process of separating the dustheap into its elements begins. The first few shakes of the sieve throw down all the fine ashes and the coal-dust. This detritus becomes a very valuable commodity when collected and put to its right use. It is used by brickmakers to mix with the clay, and does its part in the ultimate baking of the brick. In the neighbourhood of most of our railways, our readers may have noticed vast heaps of fine black dust burning with a slow combustion and with much smoke. These heaps consist of bricks which are being baked. They are placed in rows a little apart, and their interstices are filled with the fine ‘breeze,’ as the coal-ashes are termed; a light is set below, and gradually the whole mass fires to a dull red heat, the ‘breeze’ intimately mixed with the clay helping to bake the inside of the brick in the most perfect manner without vitrifying it. The ‘breeze’ is the most valuable portion of the dust, and it rises or falls in value according to the amount of building going on and to the rate of its production; in the summer, but little, comparatively, is made. Coal-dust, it must be remembered, is entirely a distinct refuse from road-dust, which also possesses a certain value, as we shall show by-and-by. When all the finer refuse has passed through the sieve, the larger and coarser articles remain upon the top. There glisten some pieces of broken glass; this, of course, only requires to be remelted to be put once more into circulation in the world. Considering the brittle nature of this material and the enormous quantities of it employed, it is fortunate that it is almost indestructible. When we break a window, we only alter the arrangement of its particles. Broken into a thousand pieces, it remains as good glass as ever; time will not touch it. The remnants of glass that are found among the Roman remains that have been lying in the ground for two thousand years, are as fit for the glass-pot as though it had been made yesterday; phials and old bottles are rarely even chipped, hence they are merely washed, and they pass again into the drawers of the chemist or apothecary.
Bones form another constant contribution to the sieve, and a valuable item they are to the dust contractor. There is a grand tussle going on for their possession both by the manufacturer and agriculturist. The larger bones are first boiled, in order to extract all their fat and gelatine. The purposes the former article is put to are too numerous to be mentioned; a good deal of the finer kind goes to make pomatum and soap; the gelatine is, we do not doubt, used as the basis of soups; and we know that it is employed in the manufacture of jujube lozenges. The smaller bones, which cannot be used in the constructive arts, are equally valuable in agriculture. When ground down to a fine powder and mixed with sulphuric acid, they become that great fertiliser, superphosphate of lime, restoring to the soil all the productive qualities that have been taken out of it by over-cropping. Wheat-growing is very exhaustive to the soil; indeed, we could not go on growing wheat for many years without reducing it to sterility, were it not for the use of this superphosphate. Phosphorus, again, is another extractive from bones.
Old iron finds its way into a very spacious sieve. Like the glass, its substance is difficult to destroy; indeed, some old iron is rendered much more valuable by being knocked about. Thus, old iron in the form of horseshoes, and horseshoe nails, fetches a much higher price than the original metal from which they were made; the toughness it acquires by constant blows and concussions gives it a greatly enhanced value in the market. Old tinned articles, such as slop-pails and saucepans, are first heated, to recover their tin and the solder with which they are made, both of which articles are more valuable than the old iron. Paper is carefully collected, and goes once again to the paper-mills. Like glass, the original fibre is very indestructible; for all we know, the note-paper on which we indite the tenderest love-letters to our beloved was made from an old account-book of a tallow-chandler, or from the musty records of the past centuries. In turning over the ragman’s basket, what a singular history we have! The ball-dress of a lady drops into a rag-basket and reappears as a billet-doux; disappears again to reappear once more in the drawing-room or the nursery as a workbox of papier-mâché, or a doll, or even into the wheels of railway trucks, and other uses to which paper is now put.
Whilst, however, we are watching the sifters grubbing over the heaps—as we have said, like so many crows—they all rise together, as we sometimes see these birds do, without any apparent cause, and make off to the nearest public-house. But there is a cause, we may be sure, for this sudden flight. If you ask the overlooker, he speedily enlightens you. ‘Oh, they’ve been and found some money in the dustheap, and when they do, it is a rule among them to share it together in drink.’ By-and-by, their little jollification over, they return. If there is anything that can be used as food in the dust, the ‘hill-women’ are entitled to it as a perquisite. In this manner they obtain many pieces of bread which the reader might not like to eat, but which they either do not object to, or put to other uses.
All the pieces of wood are also considered to be theirs; and when they leave work, they may be seen laden with fuel of this kind, which saves them more expensive firing. The broken china and crockery goes to make the foundations of roads and paths; and all the ‘soft core’—namely, refuse vegetable matter—is returned directly to the fields in the shape of manure. Old clothes are not the least valuable items of the dustyard. Anything in the shape of cotton, even to the covering of the crinoline steels and stay-bones, is put aside for the paper-mill. Cloth finds its way to the shoddy-mills of Lancashire, where it is purified and ground down and remade into coarse cloth. The old woollen garments that are turned thus into shoddy are equal to a contribution of twenty-five thousand tons of wool. Yet these old clothes, not many years ago, were considered of no more value than to be thrown upon the manure-heap, there slowly to suffer disintegration until fit to be placed upon the land. Indeed, there is a class of rags which is now taken directly to the soil. Old house and dish cloths soaked with grease and animal refuse make capital manure. In the dust-contractors’ yards we may see them spread upon the ground to dry, preparatory to their being forwarded to the hop-grounds, where they are much used for the cultivation of that plant. Old boots and shoes, if not too much dilapidated, find their way to the back slums of the town, where a class of tradesmen live who patch them up, and, by the aid of heel-ball, make them once more presentable.
We had almost forgotten to say that no inconsiderable amount of coal is rescued from the dustheap. This, of course, does not go to the brickyard; it is purchased by the poor. In well-to-do neighbourhoods, and especially in the fashionable quarter of the town, the ashes are rarely sifted; hence, pieces of coal half-burnt, or small lumps, are thrown away every morning. This extravagance makes the ‘dust’ of the better portions of the town far more valuable than that collected from the poverty-stricken districts. Indeed, the dust in the aristocratic portion of the town is richer in every valuable refuse—there are more bones, more ‘breeze,’ more refuse clothing, than ever find a chance of getting into the boxes and middens of the poor quarter.
We have said that the dust from the roads is kept distinct from the dust of the ashpit. Road-dust is always very rich in manure, which makes it valuable as a top-dressing for meadows. It is also largely used to mix with soft clay for the making of inferior bricks, and we have ascertained that it is also used for a more unsightly adulteration. The composition with which many of the cheaply run-up houses are smoothed over and made to appear ornamental, is very freely mixed with road-dust. The evil of this we speedily see in the green stains with which all such structures are disfigured, such green stains being nothing more than a vegetation that occurs in all damp spots, and finds its support in this surreptitious dust.
Thus the grimy scavenger and ‘hill-women’ perform a valuable part in the world. By their aid we return to the exhausted fields the riches the towns have drawn from them; and they arrest from speedy destruction a score of valuable products, and set them once more in circulation in the busy world.