In recent years, as the divorce rate in Mainland China continues to rise, it has given birth to a previously unprecedented emerging industry – the destruction of wedding photos.
According to statistics from the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs, from 2000 to 2019, the divorce rate has been increasing year by year, rising from 0.9 per thousand to 3.4. The number of divorces reached 4.701 million couples, which slightly decreased from 2020 to 2022 to 2.1 million couples, but by the end of 2023, it had risen again to 2.593 million couples.
With the rise in China’s divorce rate, the destruction of wedding photos has become a new emerging industry. According to a report by the American newspaper “The Washington Post” on September 18, a 42-year-old married man named Liu Wei pioneered this industry. In 2022, after resigning from a company in Beijing, he started a business in a warehouse in Langfang specializing in shredding documents and destroying personal information. Initially, this business was not very profitable, until Liu Min keenly captured the demand in this market at the beginning of 2023 and turned it into a business opportunity.
In a promotional video, he said, “You send us the photos, and we will make these things disappear completely, as if they had never existed…” The video was viewed over a million times, and his business flourished more and more.
Customers only need to send him the photos, and his team will thoroughly destroy the photos through a series of professional processes while protecting the customers’ privacy. For items like tempered glass and wood that cannot be processed by heavy-duty shredders, they will be smashed with a sledgehammer. The shards are then sent to a power plant to become biofuel. The entire destruction process will be recorded for customers to view.
It is reported that among Liu’s customers, about 80% are women who send wedding photos from various regions in China, hoping to bid farewell to the past completely through this method.
In the past nine months, they have destroyed nearly 450 sets of wedding photos. Now, more than 95% of his business involves destroying photos, with wedding photos accounting for over 80%.
Furthermore, Liu’s business has many potential customers. In the first half of this year, China saw an additional 1.274 million couples registering for divorce. Due to strict waste sorting regulations in cities, people cannot casually discard wedding photos, especially those involving privacy issues. Many individuals are faced with the dilemma of how to deal with framed wedding photos.