The herald., 1897-08-10
Machinery by Which Everything Is Disposed
OF According to Its Kind Until the Dump
Heaps Are Ready for the Market
A NOVEL SCHOOL.
Rags, Bottles, Tin Cans, and
Even Dead Cats Are All
Turned Into Money.

New York, July 27. There is a
school-the first of its kind. and very
queer sort of school it is-on 18th street
near Avenue C. 1t is teaching, by OBJ
ject lessons, the value of trifies. 1t is
one of the most interesting schools l
have ever seen.
Years ago. when people had old boots,
waste paper and tin cans to dispose of,
they threw them with cheerful una
nimity into the ash barrel. In those
days firm of contractors paid the city
$4,000 or $S0000 year for the privilege
of sorting over the ashes, rubbish and
street sweepings at the docks where the
unsightly mass was dumped" trim
ming the scows" they called it.
Then came Col. Waring. abused, as
much at first as he has since been
praised, to act as street cleaning COM
missioner. with new-fangled notions
about getting things done. BY and by,
when the Department had been made
to understand that the way to clean
streets was to clean them. instead of
not cleaning them, the doughty colonel
began to figure on the value of the rub
bish, or rather of the things thrown
away by the housekeepers of great
city. 1t occurred to him that if con-
tractors could afford to pay a lot of
money for the privilege of picking over
rubbish by hand. the city might as we'll
get a bigger profit by doing the work in
less wasteful way. So he had, as the
first step, the collecting carts gather
miscellaneous house and store rubbish
separate from ashes and garbage. And
next he built the sorting plant on 18th
CT which nnlV rarPpt1y haan
completed, for the purpose of preparing
what is salable for sale and burning the
rest If it is as successful as it bids fair
to be, similar ones will be built in diff
ferent parts of the city, to dispose of all
its waste.
The works are huddle of sheds and
an engine house of corrugated iron all
gathered within high fence. The en-
gine furnishes the necessary power and
also helps in disposing of the final
waste. as will be seen. The sheds store
the products and shelter the workers.
When a cart dumps a load of rubbish
upon a similar heap at the sorting
plant, a man stands near by with a
pitchfork with which he throws it into
sort of long trough, whose sides are
vertical boards about ten inches high.
merely to hold the contents, and whose
potion is d VIDE DdnQ OIL Iell or pOSSl-
bly, leather with roughened surface,
moving slowly as an endless belt and
carrying the waste along upon it. This
trough rises at first. then runs level at
about waist height for perhaps forty
feet. On either side stand or sit eight
or ten men and women. They are all
specialists; they might receive titles
such as "R. M.-Master of Rags" or
"B. D.-Doctor of Bottles" Each looks
sharply after one thing. One picks out
of the moving mass manila paper, an
other old newspapers, another scraps of
tin. BY the time the stream of rubbish
has passed the last expert, there is
nothing left but tiny scraps. Here the
band of felt dives into a pit on it's re-
turn trip underneath and out of sight,
and a similar but shorter band takes
up the work. Between the two bands
small stones and other heavy objects
drop into the pit. The second band car
ries the remnant up a steep slope; and
finally, at the top, the scraps of torn
up love letters, the rejected poems and
bits of cards too small to save fall into
the blazing furnace, keeping it at such
furious heat that there is always waste
steam pouring in white, feathery
cloud from the escape pipe. The utter
rubbish which reaches the fire thus fur
nishes all the steam needed to run the
machinery; the city might even sell the
power that now goes to waste. The fur
mace is no nuisance; the waste is so