"
"What is black bone coal?" Bob demanded.
"Bone coal is a product made by burning and pulverizing the large
bones left at the abbatoirs until a coarse-grained black powder not
unlike emery sand is made; if this is not allowed to become too fine
with using it is an excellent sugar filter. In fact, strangely
enough, nothing has ever been found to take its place, and it has
become a necessary but expensive agency employed in every sugar
refinery. Quantities of it are used; in our refinery alone we have
about a hundred bone coal filters and each one holds thirty tons of
black bone coal. That will give you some idea how much of it is
needed. We get nothing back on it, either, for in the process of
using it becomes finer, and after that it is good for nothing
unless, perhaps, to be made into cheap shoe-dressing. Unlike many of
the other industries sugar refining has no by-products; by that I
mean nothing on which the manufacturer may recover money. On the
contrary in the leather business, for example, almost every scrap of
material can either be utilized or sold for cash; odds and ends of
the hides go into glue stock, small bits of leather are made into
heel-taps or hardware fittings. But in refining cane-sugar there is
nothing to be turned back into money to reimburse the manufacturer
for his outlay. What isn't sugar is dead loss."
The three now moved on and saw how the heated juice traveled by
means of pipes from one vat to another, and how it constantly became
thicker and clearer.
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