Chinese factory turns wedding photos into fuel
At a dusty warehouse in northern China, Liu Wei feeds photos of beaming bridal couples into an industrial shredder — turning stories of heartbreak into a source of electricity.
Wedding photos are big business in China, where parks, temples and historic sites often teem with newlyweds posing for elaborate shots capturing their supposedly unbreakable bond. But in a country where millions of divorces take place each year, many marital snaps end up shoved into the attic or tossed into the trash.
Liu's company offers an alternative: bereft ex-lovers can have their memories destroyed and recycled into fuel.
"From our daily business exchanges, we found the destruction of personal belongings is a blank space nationwide," the 42-yearold said at his factory, 120km from Beijing. "People with less experience in the market probably wouldn't have spotted this opportunity," he added.
Despite cultural taboos around destroying images of living people, Liu's facility receives an average of five to 10 orders per day from across China.
They include large wall photos and smaller decorative shots and albums, mostly cast from plastic, acrylic and glass.
Workers heave the images onto a forklift truck and scatter them onto the warehouse floor for sorting.
They then obscure every face with dark spray paint to protect client privacy and smash unshreddable glasswork with a sledgehammer.
"These people are all trying to find closure," said Liu. "They mainly want to unpick the knots in their hearts."
Brandishing his phone, Liu films the defaced photos and sends clips to customers for final confirmation.
He estimates he has served about 1,100 clients — mostly under the age of 45, and around twothirds women — since launching the service a year ago.
They typically speak little about their separations, and several declined interview requests from AFP.
Liu says the motivations for destroying wedding photos are often complex.
"Few of them do this out of malice," he said.
"It might be that this item brings on certain thoughts or feelings... or be a hurdle hard to overcome."
Some clients attend the destructions in person to give a sense of ceremony to a closing chapter in their lives, said Liu.
Others keep their photos for years and only dispose of them when they remarry or finally come to terms with a former spouse's death.