Trades' Waste: its Treatment and Utilisation

Abstract

IN this volume the author, who is the chief inspector of rivers of the Ribble Joint Committee and consulting engineer on sanitation and rivers' pollution to the Somerset County Council and other public bodies, has put together the results of his experience and observation, as to the causes of the pollution of rivers and as to the best known practical means of preventing it. The subject, it need hardly be said, is of the greatest import ance, but it is also one of ever-increasing difficulty and perplexity. It has been forced upon public attention with more or less insistence at irregular intervals during the last half century. In 1867 the whole question was relegated to a Royal Commission, the reports of which are justly styled by the author as by far the best production on the subject hitherto published in any country. The labours of this Commission paved the way for the Rivers' Pollution Act of 1876, but this, as administered by the various local sanitary authorities, proved to be of little practical good. There can be no question that if it had been efficiently administered much might have been accomplished, and by simple means, and we should not have had to wait for the more costly operations which have resulted from the Local Government Act of 1888. Had the local authorities put the Act in operation with the vigour which they showed in the case of the Alkali Works Regulation Act a great public benefit might have been effected with comparatively little friction or irksomeness. The author points out how the opportunity was allowed to slip.

Trades' Waste: its Treatment and Utilisation.

By W. Naylor. (London: Charles Griffin and Co., Ltd., 1902.)