Power couples

These super hot days are not only sufficient to generate electricity using solar panels, but the extreme heat can also be used for cooking, thus saving on electricity or gas.

Content creator Miss Popcorn of Negros Occidental recently demonstrated this by leaving a frying pan exposed to the sun by a roadside for 20 minutes, GMA Integrated Newsfeed reports.

The sun-exposed pan was then taken into the kitchen and dipped in cooking oil to fry a few hotdogs. After the hotdogs were cooked, she served them and then fried a fish in the still hot pan.

In Langfang, Hebei province, China, a biofuel plant generates electricity not from the sun’s heat but by burning household waste. One of its sources of raw materials is a nearby warehouse that churns out the “fuel” using an industrial shredder.

The equipment is not the main driver of the one-year-old waste processing factory. Liu Fei, the factory operator, had the foresight to tap the “byproducts” of millions of divorces in the country and turn them into a business opportunity.

Liu, 42, uses wedding photos, albums, and frames disposed of by previously married couples.

At the factory, wall photos, smaller decorative pictures, and albums, mostly made of plastic, acrylic, and glass, are scattered on the warehouse floor for sorting. To protect client privacy, faces in the photos are then obscured by spraying them with dark paint.

Liu films the defaced photos with his phone and sends clips to customers for final confirmation before shredding. Given the irreversible nature of the process, Liu said he gives clients a final chance to salvage their items in case they may later regret their decision, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Some owners of the trashed wedding mementos attend the destruction in person to give a sense of ceremony to a closing chapter in their lives, said Liu, according to AFP.

After getting the green light from the customer, Liu’s staff gently pushed the photos into the shredder. The debris is then taken to the biofuel plant, which is processed with other household waste to generate electricity.

WJG WITH AFP @tribunephl_wjg