Waste

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 39, 9 May 1927, Page 5

Waste

A STATISTICIAN has estimated that petrol to the value of £50,000 is lost daily through drivers leaving their engines running -while the cars are at rest.

We talk a good deal abort waste; we pat ourselves on the bach because we have discovered methods of dealing with city refuse by turning it into manure or cement, while the technical journals are full of new inventions for making use of so-called waste products.

Yet we—most of us, at any rate—completely disregard the appalling waste that goes on in our everyday life, and it is only when some statistician reduces such waste to pounds, shillings, and pence that it dawns upon us that we are not quite the careful, economical souls we fondly believe ourselves to be.

A year ago, when wheat went up to an unusually high figure, it was pointed out that in London alone 2,000,000 loaves are wasted every week. People have gone back to the old wasteful pre-war habit of buying more than they actually need. Then look at the loss of light. In any form of artificial lighting by far the greater part of the energy consumed is wasted in the form of heat. The electric light itself gives only 10 per cent, of its energy value in light. But, apart from this, the waste caused wy leaving lights burning when not actually required is colossal. In the matter of paraffin alone, one estimate puts the loss from carelessness at 20,000,000 gallons yearly. This for the British Isles, and does not Include the rest of the world.

Speaking of light call 3 to mind coal. We burn some 20,000,000 tons of coal yearly in our grates and ranges, of which a very large proportion goes np the chimneys in the form of smoke. It is reckoned that, if all the old-fash-ioaed grates were scrapped in favour of the best modern inventions, we could get more warmth from half the amount. Here alone would be a saving of nearly twenty million pounds yearly. We all remember the mustard king, ■who said that his great income came Dot from the mustard people ate, but from what they left upon their plates. It is equally certain that the big dividends paid by soap factories do not come from the soap used so much as from the soap wasted. In former days the careful house wife bought her soap for a year at one time, and hung it in a net in the kitchen feoap dried in this way lasts twiev as long as soap fresh from the tactorj.