In a dusty warehouse in China, an operator feeds photos of radiant newlyweds into an industrial shredder: a way to turn the page for their divorced owners but also…to produce electricity.
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Wedding photos are serious business in China and couples often spend large sums on elaborate shots, taken in parks, historic streets or temples, meant to illustrate their supposedly unbreakable bond.
But in a country where millions of divorces are finalized every year, many photos of these faded marital joys end up, at best, in the attic or the trash.
AFP
Liu Wei’s company, which specializes in demolition, offers an alternative: physically destroying these photographic memories.
“Through our activity, we discovered that the destruction of personal property was a bit of a niche that no one had spotted,” explains the 42-year-old business manager in his Langfang factory, located around 120 km from Beijing.
There remains a certain taboo in China around destroying photos of living people, but Liu Wei’s warehouse receives an average of five to 10 requests per day, from all over the country.
Everything goes: from large framed wall photos to small albums. Products which are most often made of plastic, acrylic and glass.
AFP
“A barrier”
In the warehouse, using black spray paint, employees mask customers’ faces in order to preserve their privacy. Then smash the glass using a sledgehammer.
“These are all people trying to move on,” says Liu Wei.
The photos provide a glimpse of these families, now broken, in happier times.
AFP
In one of them, a woman in a white wedding dress is lying on a bed of flowers, while another shows a loving couple gazing tenderly into each other’s eyes.
There, lovebirds are dressed in matching football jerseys, ball in hand, while next to it lies the image of a man in love with his pregnant wife, on whose stomach he tenderly places his face.
Since its launch a year ago, around 1,100 customers have already requested this destruction service, says Liu Wei. Most are under the age of 45 and around two-thirds are women.
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Customers who often wish to remain discreet. Several of them, contacted by AFP, did not wish to speak.
Their motivations for parting with wedding photos are often complex.
“Few do it maliciously,” says Liu Wei.
“It is mainly because this object arouses in them certain negative thoughts or feelings” or “that it constitutes an obstacle” to overcoming their grief, he emphasizes.
AFP
Household waste
Some people travel in person to witness the destruction of the photos, as a sort of closure to a chapter of their lives.
Given the irreversible nature of the process, Liu Wei contacts his clients shortly before destruction, to give them one last chance to recover their items in case they regret their decision.
After getting their green light, he films with his smartphone his colleagues who gently push the photos into the large grinding teeth of the immense shredder.
AFP
The debris is then transported to a factory, where it is processed with other household waste to produce electricity.
The divorce rate skyrocketed in China after marriage laws were relaxed in 2003.
It has fallen somewhat since the establishment in 2021 by the authorities of a mandatory and controversial “reflection period” of one month after any divorce request.
China recorded 2.9 million divorces in 2022, compared to 4.3 million in 2020.
The number of marriages increased last year for the first time in almost 10 years.