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A single strand of burnt-out Christmas tree lights weighs almost nothing in your hand. Toss it into a garbage or recycling bin and you won’t have to work any harder to take it to the curb. But what if, just after Christmas, someone were to go door-to-door in your neighborhood and pick-up all of those nearly weightless burnt-out strands of Christmas tree lights. How much would they weigh, then?
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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The unmentioned interesting fact here, is that due to the very low labor cost compared to here, recycling greatly reduces the Chinese manufacturing cost, compared to buying the raw materials from the US or other sources. For us, recycling is considered a "green" method to help the environment, but is expensive due to the cost of labor to do the work. The fact that they can pay to have our garbage shipped there, recycle it and make new products, ship them back and still sell them for less than we can is a good clue as to why factories here have closed up and very little is truly "Made in the USA" any more. Even those Christmas Tree lights we throw away and they buy to recycle were made there in the first place.
So this is why the Chinese largest holiday is after ours... they have to wait to get our lights and fix them.... all in time for Lunar New Year! HIGH FIVE!
They also send back the lights in the form of air pollution from their unregulated industries.
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