WASTE PREVENTION

Hokitika Guardian, 18 November 1931, Page 3

WASTE PREVENTION

It is recorded that a mustard manufacturer once said ho made his money out of the mustard purchasers wasted. Even in the poorest families there is waste, not of condiments, but of food. The thrifty French have for many years considered the' English as a wasteful people, and this belief is quite justified by the carelessness of town dwellers. In country districts the farm cook is seldom chided for over-filling the garbage tins w«sh “scraps,” because poultry, pigs, ducks and dogs use everything digestible. In dogs it is converted into ’ energy, any the farmer sees household waste turned by pigs, ducks and hens inro food for his family and for market, but in town the- dustman —I beg hi-s pardon, the “sanitary carter”—alone knows how much food material goes to the destructor. Vegetarians are always telling the public the value of .peelings, yet tons of the natural coverings of fruit and of potatoes go each week to be destroyed by fire. The mineral salts in bone are like brick's which have been- in a wall and can be vised again, and even after roasting, boiling, and calcining the residue lias a. medicinal value. The good house-keeper who ha® a use for waste fat, for tea leaves and animal scraps is yet the one who boils vegetable® and pours the water—with most of the soluble salts- —down' the drain. A new’ food called fish flour has been developed and may soon reach a commercial stage. The United States Bureau of Fisheries announces that the product is made from the edible pant® and the backbone of fish remaining from the filleting or pacKaged fish industry. The fish is dried in vacuum and ground into a fine meal. Twenty million pounds a year are available for this use if a market develops. The food is rich in calcium phosphate, much needed by the human system, and in other helpful minerals, including iodine. Experiments {.re being made if Washington to k{M n how children thrive' on fish flour cookies. The commercial uses of waste material are well known, the glue from bone, horn and hide, the conversion of nearly all fabric waste into something useful, the recovery of metals ,and chemical combinations of them, the leather composites, the distillations of alcohols, even “destructor bricks,” these efforts and dozens of others to Use waste material usefully have become commonplace since the nays of Dickens’ Golden Dustman, but in the home there is still the rubbish bin and its weekly burden of what, by community effort, might be turned into money, or which, by personal knowledge and care, might be reduced in quantity with a corresponding reduction in the housekeeper’s expenses. I —H.A.Y.