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.'"

Comments

Re:Consumption resumption.

[AmiMoJo]

The real story is that Americans are so wasteful that they'll throw away a string of lights for the sake of one bulb.

The real story is that the EU made China clean up. Okay, Japan deserves some of the credit too.

The EU has introduced various rules aimed at cleaning up the pollution created why products are manufactured and disposed of, as well as protecting people's health. ROHS and WEEE are the most well known, and although technically the only apply to countries in the EU the reality is that China has to abide by them as well in order to sell to us and then recycle our waste.

It is just as shame that two other important initiatives, namely forcing manufacturers to standardise on USB micro/mini for charging and allow batteries to be replaced and removed for disposal, seem to have stalled. None the less it is a triumph for our left-wing socialist nanny-state anti-business anti-competitive anti-trade anti-consumer ecomentalist tree-hugging undemocratic bureaucratic United States of Europe. We made a real difference to our own lives and those of people in China, and even to people in the US since they get a lot of the same stuff from China that we do.