China’s divorce rate soars. Cue the big wedding photo shredder

Wedding photos about to be destroyed. The resulting debris is sent to a waste-to-energy facility, where it becomes biofuel. (Image: Yufan Lu for The Washington Post

The Washington Post

Sun, 22 Sep 2024

By Yufan Lu and Lyric LiLiu Wei calls himself a “love story morgue operator”.Since leaving his job at a state-owned pharmaceutical company in Beijing in 2022, Liu has been running a business as a professional shredder of documents and other personal information at a factory warehouse in Langfang, just south of the capital. It was not a particularly lucrative endeavour until Liu seized upon a “blue ocean” market early last year: urban divorcees who want to get rid of their wedding photos.“We are a crematorium o...

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