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6. It has thereforebeen decided to select a suitable site with sea frontage and preferably on the fringe of the urban area and establish there plant and equipment to carry out the triple purpose of manufacturing compost, extracting selvage and sterilizing nightsoil buckets. Machinery will largely replace the present system of cleaning buckets and of doing what composting there is by manual labour which is unsatisfactory and becoming steadily more expensive. Instead of two separate and unconnected sites being used the single site selected will serve equally well to receive the materiɛls for composting and distribute the compost and by-products. Nightsoil and city refuse could be transported from the urban area by barge to this combined site at which the entire process of manufacturing compost from nightsoil and garbage could be carried out. Experiments have been in progress for some time on the composting of city refuse and nightsoil, and it has been found that a satisfactory compost can be produced which is innocuous from the point of view of disease. Inorganic refuse would continue to be used for reclamation purposes but all valuable salvage would be extracted from it, with a resulting economy by the sale of its by-products.
7. By establishing such a plant the Government would be able to perform a public health service of considerable magnitude by providing additional hygienic safeguards in those parts of the urban area without a flush system, and by selling compost to New Territories farmers at a low price, compelling them through lack of supply to give up the use of raw nightsoil es a fertilizer. At the same time use can be made of the salvage extracted from city rubbish.
8. It is of interest that from the small experimental plant at present producing compost in the New Territories, the Agricultural Department has recently been allowing farmers to make free use of the compost and with highly satisfactory results, in that farmers from the neighbouring district are becoming interested in compost as a fertilizer, and realize that it has a greater residual value than nightsoil. The present indications are therefore that if compost could be produced on any scale in this Colony it would be accepted by the farmers and it woul? certainly be welcomed by the health authorities.
9.
A service could thus be rendered to almost the entire Colony, affecting public health in both the urban and the rural areas.