This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 03/06/24
Crushed
I lead myself down some strange byways, I do.
I've linked before to some of the YouTube channels that I follow (in that non-committal way I have of not actually subscribing to anything, just looking every now and then for anything new on there). I've mentioned the music analysis and reactions of Doug Helvering, the crash-and-bash of Chopito Rally and the enterprising gentlemen of Belarus' very own Belko Wood and their mean way with a chainsaw. It's also been very remiss of me not also pointing you to Rick Jones' Old Classic Car channel which - as the name helpfully suggests - is all about motor vehicles from the general period of the 1920s to the early 1980s, with collections of photographs of cars of those eras along with regular long videos of Rick (and his 16-year-old son Harley, who has his own channel at CarTraction) going around classic car shows, motor museums and exhibitions. For someone like me, who was car mad in his boyhood, it's essential nostalgia.
The channel I'm going to talk about here, though, is a real oddity, and one I stumbled upon originally out of curiosity, but have got slightly obsessed with since. The 'curiosity' bit was when, just a few weeks ago, I idly clicked upon a video which showed one of those industrial crushing/shredding machines at work. Now, I don't really know why I would have been drawn in further to this whole subject, but drawn in I most certainly was. So much so, in fact, that I must have watched a couple of dozen or more of them since.
There are a number of such channels on YT, but the one I homed in on is called Great Technology. This is clearly based somewhere in China (you know, the China which is the Great Existential Threat To Our Way Of Life and therefore deemed uncultured and undeveloped, despite the fact that - to give just one instance - they had developed explosives for warfare at a time when the tribes of Europe were trying to resolve their disputes by bashing each other across the head with bits of tree), and is obviously filmed in a recycling plant of some sort.
I don't know what the blades and grinders of these be-steroided mincing machines are made of - I suspect tungsten carbide steel or some such material - but they are most definitely effective. Wood, plastic, metal; all may be fed into the maw of the beast and meet their end - or perhaps one should say their transformation - in a mechanical black hole from which nothing can escape, and where the singularity leads to the conveyor belts which cart the detritus away.
Nothing, but nothing escapes its transfiguration. As a result, I have seen the following items sliced, diced, pulverised and otherwise utterly shagged:
- Bicycles (including those carts they pull around the place), mopeds, motorbikes (often including their engines) and - on one occasion - an entire Renault Clio, along with two-stroke motors of various sizes
- Office and domestic furniture, including those horrible waiting-room-style plastic chairs, which certainly had it coming to them
- PCs (desktop and tower), laptops, printers and scanners. along with piles of mobile phones and - demonstrating how short even the most intense fads can be - a box full of fidget spinners (so-o-o 2010s, dahlings!)
- Domestic appliances of assorted kinds: fridges, freezers, washing machines, along with pans and the inevitable woks
- Sundry other pieces of industrial hardware; pipes, oil drums, radiators and heaters
From my viewing experience of all these, I have formulated the following observations:
- Circular things can be a problem because they have nothing for the blades to lock on to unless the items are inserted in a particular way
- Hard plastic is a great generator of shrapnel
- It's amusing to see what happens when you shove a water cooler in there without emptying its reservoir first. In short, there's a fair old splash
- Similarly, keyboards are fun from the way that the keys fly all over the place like in a popcorn machine, or one of those things which fling the balls about in bingo halls
- More alarming is when sparks are emitted from the engines of various types when the shear force from the blades ignites the lubricating oil residue (which residue ends up coating the blades and must be a proper sod to get off again)
There are more disturbing sights in all this, however, especially to someone like me who has a disturbing tendency to anthropomorphise. Bicycles trigger this the most, particularly when fed in arse-first. The frantic waggling of the handlebars as the rest of the machine is gradually devoured is reminiscent either of an okapi desperately trying to escape a lioness, or else that creepy frantic head-waggling exhibited by a trapped wasp.
Another troubling thought comes from seeing children's bikes, pedal cars (or their latter-day hi-tech equivalents) and toys getting squished. I can't help but think that, not too long before they met their fate, they were the most important things in the world to little Li Hsien and tiny Feng Guo. It seems to me to be a deeply unfitting end to something that was once so desired. But then, the soi-disant 'People's Republic' is now as obsessed with material hyper-consumerism as everywhere else which isn't within the realm of the Emperor Kim.
Further questions arise: although it's a good thing that some of the worn-outs and cast-offs of modern capitalism are being recycled, one wonders at the efficiency of it. For example, when you crush up a complete PC desktop, you are destroying components which could be re-used (it's a similar point to the one I made here a few years ago). It would take a little longer to dispose of the genuinely unwanted parts, but more would be saved to be re-used, which must surely be a better outcome than taking a sledgehammer, metaphorically and literally speaking, to the whole thing.
Another point: as sound an idea as recycling undoubtedly is, only a percentage of what you started with will be of any use in its future forms; one runs up inevitably against the law of diminishing returns, and so one is merely delaying the point where the resource is exhausted altogether rather than averting that eventuality in toto.
On top of that, in what way is all this stuff recycled? I can see how it might be possible to sort out the ferrous metals from the mess, but what of the rest? The non-ferrous metals? The plastics? These materials form a large proportion of what goes through the mincer. Is the process seen in these videos merely a way of breaking down the items and their constituent materials to sufficiently small dimensions to enable their being disposed of (by fire, for example) in a more 'discreet' way? Especially if it doesn't have the massive profit potential of all the copper wire which is to be ripped out of telecommunications systems in the next few years in preference for optical fibre.
And one final consideration: all the wittering about how we may dispose of all that plastic tends to leave out the most obvious solution, e.g. don't create so much of it in the first bloody place. There are available alternatives, even if some of them seem a bit goofy (like Tesco tattooing their avocados). Beyond that, how about we all strive to:
- Not buy things we really don't actually need
- Not get a bigger said thing (or too great a quantity of it) than we actually require just because we can, or because we want to flash our affluence
- Not simply dump anything which may be of use to someone else, and don't dump anything in any way simply because it is either out of 'fashion' or we've got bored with it?
No, I don't think it's likely either.
Apart from the ego element, consumer hyper-capitalism depends entirely on a 'buy, use and dispose' strategy, and given that that ideology rules all bar one state on the whole planet, discarding it (to put it ironically) will not be a widespread choice. In the same way that rampant consumption is the enemy of so many things, it is definitely the sworn foe of reasoned self-restraint, and we will go on until there is no longer a choice for most of us, at which point those who have led us to that downfall will corral the whole of the remaining production of Stuff for their own needs alone, and the rest of us will be left with no alternative at all other than to 'make do and mend'. Just as it used to be for most of us.
