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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.'"
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"
They do the same with executions.
How so? Turn them into shoe soles in a wet process?
Seems to me to be more about capturing cheap resources for cheap products that will themselves end up in a burn or landfill. It's just delaying the inevitable.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Exactly. Human soles are eternal after all.
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.
Isn't that the point of the "Reuse" part of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"? To minimise the additional resources extracted when convertable 'waste' is at hand?
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.
So you're saying to expect to be modded down for your dinner party racism?
You called it, I guess.
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 trade the market and this was always a question for me, can the Chinese be innovative. And here we have it, they can be innovative. Not that I thought they couldn't. I was just wondering WHEN.
Here is the problem that the US faces, less so in Europe. WTF does America do anymore? I mean really?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
I thought it was equally much a simple/cheap way to use low-voltage bulbs without a transformer?
Could you have come up with the idea of watering down milk and then adding a poisonous chemical that shows up as protein in some tests to cover it up?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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"
Too bad we don't do that for financial crimes. Ever see pics of Chinese executions?
Our smug Wall Streeters who just blew up our economy would look less smug facing shame and shooting. THAT would be an edifying spectacle.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
A Christmas tree is a completely secular symbol, and you are a retard. That is all.
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.
WTF does America do anymore? I mean really?
It's a common rhetorical, but it doesn't really work, does it?
We're near the largest in:
Auto manufacturing, aviation manufacturing, nautical manufacturing, space manufacturing, and high tech manufacturing. Grain production, dairy production, meat production, fruit production, and vegetable production. Software, movies, books, websites, music, and television. That's off the top of my head.
Or, to put it slightly differently, we are ninth in the world in GDP per capita, number one in the world in GDP, and our GDP is increasing both absolute and per-capita. We do everything, and we're pretty darned good at it, too. The only remotely plausible sense in which we are not good at everything is in the sense that we are no longer laughably far out in front of everyone else like we were 40 years ago.
Now, I think we should be trying to be laughably far out in front of everyone else. I even think we have the potential to do so and I have some solid data on a few key points to back up my belief. But that doesn't mean we are doing poorly yet -- we have a long way left to fall, even at our current lackluster rate of climb.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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.
Auto manufacturing, aviation manufacturing, nautical manufacturing, space manufacturing, and high tech manufacturing. Grain production, dairy production, meat production, fruit production, and vegetable production. Software, movies, books, websites, music, and television.
And it all sucks. Yes, I generalize... but my point is valid:
Our automobiles are a total and outright embarrassment.
We're making evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) advances in aviation (if you call over-complicating them an advance - fly by wire, anyone?) but who's going to buy them, who wouldn't already be manufacturing their own?
Nautical manufacturing? For, pleasure boats? No; that chapter is clearly coming to a close as there'll soon be no middle class left to sustain that. Commercial fishing? Right! Cargo freighters and oil tankers? Perhaps for a little longer, but it's hardly a growth industry; the days of cheap goods and affordable oil (subsidized by the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency) are coming to an end and anyone with a brain cell can see that.
Our food production? Sure... if you call that pesticide-ridden, nutritionally-devoid, utterly-without-flavor sludge "food," then you're absolutely right.
Books, movies, software? Pfft. How much do you think those "industries" are actually contributing to this country (as opposed to the corporate coffers conveniently located in tax shelters?)
No, we're fucked... and anyone who says otherwise is either a total moron or has an agenda.
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.'"
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.