GREAT WASTE OF CINDERS

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 67, 13 December 1918, Page 5

GREAT WASTE OF CINDERS

SCREENING OF REFUSE URGED.

The enormous waste of cinders in theUnited Kingdom is estimated by the National Salvage Council as equivalent to 2,226,000 tons of coal a year (says a recent announcement from the British Coal Controller's office). Steps are be-' ing token to save this valuable .fuel, which would be of great service in helping toi reduce the national coal shortage. A searching investigation by the Salvage Council into the possibilities of municipal salvage just completed shows that every year 3,745,000 tons of cinders are either tipped or burnt in destructors. This, moderately estimated, is equivalent to 2,675,000 tons of coal. A number of local authorities, however, use their destructors for steam raising. The steam raising power of the refuse burnt in destructors last year was approximately equivalent to 419,000 tons of coal. This must .be deducted from the gross salvage. When that is done, we have the equivalent of 2,226,000 tons of conl absolutely thrown away. London alone is responsible for a cinder waste expressed in coal equivalent of half a million tons a year. A cinder campaign has been started by the National Salvage Council. Its object is to induce local authorities who are at present wastefully disposing of refuse to screen it. Apart from other products of value, the recovory of the cinders now going to waste, reckoning coal lit 265. a. ton, means an annual saving of ,£2,894,000. The labour saving also would be great. On Hie basis of the 1916 colliery output it would take 11,000 miners working a whole year to raise the amount of coal which in heat value equals the cinders annually dumped into municipal Tefuse heaps.