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The Chinese Town Where Old Christmas Lights Go
retroworks writes "Shanghai based reporter Adam Minter visits where recycled Christmas Tree lighting goes in China. Visiting Shijao, the town known as the Mecca for Christmas tree light recycling, he finds good news. The recycling practices in China have really cleaned up. Plastic casings, which were once burned, are now recycled into shoe soles in a wet process. Minter concludes that even if you try to recycle your wire in the U.S., the special equipment and processes for Christmas light recycling have been perfected in China 'to the benefit of the environment, and pocketbooks, in both countries.'"
First post!
Glad to see China taking environmentally friendly steps.
Getting from Christmas tree lights to slipper soles, isn't simple. It requires a bit of innovation and tinkering. Yong Chang's system, for example, took a full year to perfect (one of Li's relatives, a college-educated engineer who now runs their business operations, designed it.
SEE! Chinese are innovative.
The practices for this specific thing may have been cleaned up but China is still buried in a toxic wasteland. I have zero reason to believe they care one whit about the environment...
Not really. Ever hear of RoHS?
That means that every toy you buy has a planned obsolescence, and that it will be less harmful for Chinese villagers to wade through your garbage.
Everybody wins! Corporations get to sell you the same thing every 2 years, Chinese peasants get cancer later in age, and, well, that's it. But keep buying that crap - you are the pillar of the American economy.
Indeed, if there's a weak environmental link in the chain, it's the American consumers who start it by buying tens of millions of pounds of Christmas tree lights every year, only to throw them into the recycle bin, guilt free, when a bulb breaks. But Li, for one, doesn't mind: that waste is the raw material for his green business.
The real story is that Americans are so wasteful that they'll throw away a string of lights for the sake of one bulb.
BTW wonder how their process will deal with LED lights?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Ever hear of RoHS?
While I'm sure there's a US equivalent, this is an EU directive. And while I've made the occasionally entreaty for Europeans to pay for our (US's) boondoggles, they aren't putting out. For some reason, it isn't going the other way either.
(Awaiting modbombing and overwhelming "you don't understand"'s from the 50 Cent Party)
Here is something you can't understand
How I could just kill a man.
... oh wait, that was the Cypress Hill party, nevermind.
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
If anything, the Chinese (and like-minded Third World countries) make a point to detect inspections early enough to clean up things.
How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article. If they have perfected a system to remove the plumes of smoke then I think we can consider that to be good enough.
(Awaiting modbombing and overwhelming "you don't understand"'s from the 50 Cent Party)
So you expect the flames? You do realise that there is a legitimate moderation of flamebait that suits your message perfectly. You can hardly complain if people mod you down when you tell them the reason that they should do so.
The party of China must look back a few years to understand:
Sex.
Money.
Competition.
That's the thing. They are connected in series in ORDER to fail. THAT'S THE POINT.
So you're saying to expect to be modded down for your dinner party racism?
You called it, I guess.
this is an EU directive
Oh, wow, so you guys don't have any balls and gotta do it! We do it because it helps our economy.
the system benefits the environment and the workers, obviously.
why else would wall street support it?
i know there are some people who still complain - about mine tailings, runoff, lack of an EPA, endemic corruption, etc. but they are the typical whiners and protestors you find in any country.
the guys really running the show - the Chinese Communist Party and their partners at Goldman Sachs + other firms, have only the best interests of the environment and the nation at heart.
what have HOSTS files have to do with all of this?
Christmas lights... lol, what a waste religion is.
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
No, Mecca is the better word - there's a reason we use it. We say something is the 'mecca' for an activity or industry because of the Hajj. Almost two million foreigners a year visiting one city for one specific ritual makes a pretty good metaphor for colossal, single-minded undertakings - the kind of single-mindedness you see in one town recycling billions of pounds of electrical waste, for example.
Evoking Jerusalem would be a confusing and less accurate metaphor for the sake of being cute.
And needlessly demeaning Mecca is better? Seriously, Mecca is more than just the end point of a massive annual pilgrimage.
Now we'll get to listen to conservative bitching about overregulation and how without so many damn environmental laws that recycling could happen here. Then the liberals will answer that corporations would never pay a living wage, or even minimum wage, to do that here when it can be done by miserable overworked hut dwellers in China - environmental laws or not.
They're both probably right, and both answers make me equally depressed. Exporting work and materials that American liberals won't allow here because of well-meaning but often moronic regulations, but which American conservatives probably wouldn't do here anyway because they're cheap fucks.
I need a drink.
I remember you, you called me a racist for daring to suggest that the Chinese have a habit of cutting corners here and there.
If the lead in toys and melamine in milk aren't proof enough, that was the day before that train fell off the rails and they tried to bury it to hide the evidence - while there were people still in it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
American consumers who start it by buying tens of millions of pounds of Christmas tree lights every year, only to throw them into the recycle bin, guilt free, when a bulb breaks.
And that is why the rest of the world hates you or thinks that you are fucking nuts.
How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article.
Probably in a different village that reporters don't have access to. That's the usual way of things.
How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article. If they have perfected a system to remove the plumes of smoke then I think we can consider that to be good enough.
They don't. The process is just harmful in a different way(read: chemical burns & exposure).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
From the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
"Mecca (as n. a Mecca) a place which attracts people of a particular group or with a particular interest: Holland is a Mecca for jazz enthusiasts."
Mecca in the dictionary has two meanings, as A noun and as a proper noun. We're using one form here, the other form being completely irrelevant. But I wish you all the best of luck in getting a correct and common use of an English word changed.
CHICOM propaganda ... unfortunately, the CHICOMs still use a single 9mm in the back of the head for dissidents
They are connected in series in ORDER to fail. THAT'S THE POINT.
I wonder why should two different people waste mod points on an AC who spews bullshit like this.
They are in series because it saves a lot of copper. In series you use one thin wire and no transformer is needed. You add enough low-voltage bulbs in series to get the line voltage and the current is that of one single bulb.
If they were in parallel you'd need two wires thick enough to transmit the total current of all the bulbs added together, plus a transformer to lower the voltage. Those tiny bulbs cannot have too much voltage because the filament must fit inside them, the higher the voltage the longer the filament must be. There's a limit on how thin you can draw a tungsten filament, so ultimately it must be made longer to have the needed impedance.
well-meaning but often moronic regulations
There are people who don't realize how immensely detailed regulations must be to work. When regulations don't let recyclers release some toxic waste the result is that everything becomes toxic waste.
Unfortunately those people didn't learn from history. The theory was that a well planned and regulated economy would be more efficient than capitalism, and too many people cannot see that things don't work that way.
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
When you consider all the different products an industrial economy needs you would need the whole population of the country working in the plans to make sure all the items needed will be available.
That's what's called "capitalism". A feedback system where the production of the economy is dynamically adjusted as needed. There's a control variable to allow one to compare the relative urgency in producing each item, this variable is called "price".
Government regulation should be limited to overall guiding principles, not detailed specifications.
"Not really. Ever hear of RoHS? "
Rodents of Herculean Size?
So you expect the flames? You do realise that there is a legitimate moderation of flamebait that suits your message perfectly. You can hardly complain if people mod you down when you tell them the reason that they should do so.
With any article concerning China, there seems to be an even greater consistency of criticism being attacked with high volume. I only wish to pre-empt such activity.
China's "50 Cent Party" - paid commentators to guide opinion.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I didn't see any masks on the workers.
It is hard to believe that process didn't produce any airborne toxins.
It is also hard to believe that the water added to the crushed lights to make a sludge for processing isn't polluting something somewhere.
I used to bullseye womprats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters...
hehehehhe pocketbooks! What a funny word!!
It's not demeaning. But your need to appear offended demeans yourself.
Why, exactly, is it demeaning? The residents of Makkah, along with all other Muslims, believe in the miraculous virgin birth of Isa (Jesus). It's Easter (and solar calendars) they disagree with.
I can't remember the last time I was offered an electronic device that doesn't purport to be RoHS-compliant. Even electronic components are almost always RoHS now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So EU regulations really are sapping our precious electronics.
We do it because it helps our economy.
And if the people saying that sort of thing actually would check if it were helping the economy, then it'd be a good thing.
And needlessly demeaning Mecca is better?
I'm not worried. Sounds like you'll let us know, if it ever happens.
There's a subtle difference, though, between claiming it's *only* the Chinese and "other Third World countries" that do such things though while implicitly holding up the USA as some sort of yardstick to aspire to, as suggested by the OP.
It's casual racism.
I'm not disputing the fact that there are Chinese companies cutting corners or otherwise doing things cheaply to save a buck, but it's not the exclusive domain of "anyone who's not us" (we'll leave aside the outdated 'third' world country comment).
So, by the metric we're using, all US companies do their best to fuck over their workers, lobby to keep service staff under minimum wage and keep laws around to be able to hire and fire at will so that no one can accumulate any holiday pay, and like Union Carbide are all totally fine setting up shop in other countries and poisoning them then denying anything ever happened. They can just kill 3000 local residents in India with one of the most unsafe chemical plants ever constructed and when a large incident occurs you just abandon it (I mean, why clean it up?! This is America! We have Mexicans to clean shit up after us!) leaving a site with open pools of mercury lying around, and with all manner of persistent organic solvents seeping into the ground water.
Yup, sounds pretty typical of an American company to me. They're still dodging responsibility to this day.
Of course, when you have a habit of determining that it's cheaper to pay the legal costs of anyone who sues you when their family members burn to death rather than fixing your shoddy American-made product, no wonder nothing good is made in America any more.
See, I can do it too!
That means that every toy you buy has a planned obsolescence
I think everybody has missed your point ... good try though.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
That's a classic "free market" claim. Then look at how Wal-Mart works.
Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Store managers have almost no autonomy in the Wal-Mart system. Even the store thermostats are controlled from Bentonville. Purchasing is centralized in Bentonville, where vendors go to the famous Corridor of Doom to present their products to Wal-Mart buyers. ("What can you do for Wal-Mart today?" is how each buyer starts the conversation.)
Everything is bar-coded or has RFID tags. Wal-Mart insisted on vendors providing bar-codes on everything. Everything entering or leaving a Wal-Mart store or warehouse gets scanned, and Central Control (the data center in Jane, MO, about 15 miles from Bentonville) gets all the data each day.
Wal-Mart's data cycle is daily, and their planning cycle is weekly. Most small retailers don't have that clear an idea of what their stores are actually doing. This gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage.
That's a level of control the USSR could only dream of. It's interesting to speculate whether the USSR's style of communism would have worked if it had survived into the era where data collection, communications, and computing made central planning really effective. Gosplan, the USSR's national planning operation, had a monthly data cycle and a yearly planning cycle. They also had a lot of phony data in the system, because it was being summarized at lower levels. It's easy to fake "we made 10,000 widgets". It's hard to fake "we made 10,000 widgets, shipped in these transactions, and scanned in by the recipients".
Wal-Mart runs a bigger economy than Gosplan ever did.
We ought to bomb the Hajj. It's what military folks like to call a "target-rich environment"
From the article:
"The recycling practices in China have really cleaned up. Plastic casings, which were once burned, are now recycled into shoe soles in a wet process. "The plastic casing are ground to powder and mixed with MSG, ground garlic and used car engine oil."
"The resulting paste is used as a flavoursome ingredient in the recycling plant workers' lunches and because it is salty and has interesting bitter notes it reduces the demand for soy sauce - now woefully under-supplied in china," said the managing director, "the workers' stools are later collected and filtered to refine the rubbery by-product of the fully natural HCl process we have discovered."
"We hit on this process by accident after adopting a new policy to feed our workers because we take employee welfare very seriously."
Right, because we still refer to black people as Negroes and the Chinese as Orientals. The point wasn't that people don't do it, the point was that it shows a distinct lack of cultural awareness which leads the failure in communication between the US and its allies and the Arab world.
No they don't. It says so right in the Oxford English Dictionary. The term "Negros" has fallen out of favour in the US and the UK and is often consider widely offensive. Similar words are used to describe "Oriental" which goes on to say that the word "Asian" is a more socially accepted alternative.
It's all written right there. You see the Dictionary is not as dumb a book you think it is, and you know what, if I offend some incredible minority out there by using a proper noun as a noun, then fuck it. I can't please everyone.
Damn I swore, I wonder how many people take offence to the above sentence as a result. My guess is several orders of magnitude more than people who think the term "a Mecca" is somehow culturally insensitive.