Excerpt from The Sanitary Disposal of Municipal Waste (Classic Reprint)
Civilization costs — and the higher the civilization the greater the cost. One item in the cost of civilization is the price of cleanliness and cleanliness means health and life, for without it there can be neither life, health or civilization.
Watch a barnacle in a pool of water at low tide. The creature occupies a pearly house with a trap door in the roof. Suddenly the double door opens, and a delicate hand is thrust out. The fingers close upon some invisible food, the hand is withdrawn and the door closed. Later, when we may not be looking, and when this low form of life has been fed, the door will be opened and the wastage thrown out, because the creature obeys the ancient, primal' instinct — to be clean.
A city obeys the same instinct, and the greatest problem now be fore the American people is municipal cleanliness. The wastage of every city must be disposed of every day, or the people perish. Now the key to cleanliness is not a broom — but fire because heat is the great transformer. Dirt has been described as matter out of place. A better definition is matter in the wrong form. The only way to keep a city clean is to transform its poisonous dirt into innocent ash. This has long been known, for the people of ancient cities had their sanitary burning places, where, with purifying fires, they tried in some crude way to ward off plagues and pestilence.
We know today that modern science and engineering skill have made it possible to transform a valueless menace to life and health into safe and useful materials, having a real commercial value. It is to this important subject the following pages are devoted and the reader is invited to examine all that here follows because it is believed that the facts here presented are correctly presented, and the deductions based upon them will be found to be borne out by practical experience upon a commercial scale.
Two facts stand out in the following pages with convincing clear ness — the safe and rapid destruction of waste material of all kinds is a question of temperature, and the work itself can be done at a profit. Everything burns at some temperature. Five pounds of wet kitchen refuse thrown into the cook stove will put out the fire. Five thou sand pounds thrown into a regenerative destructor will part with its water in a few moments, and then burn rapidly and be speedily transformed into harmless ash. It is purely a question of the rightfurnace and temperature, and what is true of kitchen waste is equally true of every form of wastage from mill, store, house, hotel or hospital.