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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.'"
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"
Exactly. Human soles are eternal after all.
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
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.
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.
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.
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.