China’s shared bike revolution has been remarkable. Pretty much every city in the country now has its sidewalks cluttered with bikes of various bright colors that can be opened with the scan of a QR code and ridden away for pennies.
Sounds pretty environmentally friendly right? Well, kind of. The well-documented flip-side of the phenomenon has been “shared bike graveyards”, where discarded and disused bicycles (plus those belonging to companies who’ve gone bust) are bundled together into towering piles of twisted metal, rubber, and plastic — a horrible waste of resources.
These bike graveyards have been around for a while now and made for some shocking but also visually kind of fascinating fodder for media both across the country and internationally. And yes, we’ve posted about them before.
But the graveyards have been back in the news in the last couple of days after a short film from director Wu Guoyong started making the rounds on Weibo and WeChat. The film, entitled 无处安放 No Place to Place, features stunning footage from sites in 20 cities across China, from Hefei to Xiamen, Beijing to Nanjing.
And even if you’ve seen photos of the graveyards before, it’s an extraordinary thing to watch. Here’s the video on QQ (we’ll update this post with a YouTube version as soon as we find one – now below):
And here are some crazy stills:
With a bit of luck this video going viral will spark some sort of response to all this waste.
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