The side hustle cashing in on China’s soaring divorce rate

Soaring divorce rates in China have spawned a new side business – to professionally shred wedding photos and other reminders of unhappy nuptials.

“We are a crematorium of those photos when their life cycle ends,” Liu Wei, an entrepreneur running a factory that destroys photos and documents on a mass scale, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

The self-described “love story morgue operator” started his business in Langfang, just south of Beijing, in 2022.

He is now inundated with customers who want to rid themselves of framed marriage portraits without burning them, which is considered to be bad luck.

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of divorces in China spiked from about 1.2 million to more than four million as society began to shrug off traditional stigmas about marriage breakdowns.

Alarm about the shrinking population prompted the government in 2021 to institute a mandatory 30-day-cooling-off period to prevent “impulsive” separations, bringing the divorce rate down to less than three million a year.

In August, the government – struggling to incentivise young people to marry and have children to tackle record low birth rates – proposed to revise the law again to build a “family friendly society” that would make it simpler for couples to register for marriage but tougher to file for divorce.

The number of Chinese couples who got married in the first half of 2024 fell by 498,000, from a year earlier to 3.43 million – the lowest since 2013.

Some 1.3 million Chinese couples have already divorced in the first half of this year.

But what may be bad for population growth is good for Mr Liu’s booming business.

Pre-wedding photoshoots, involving couples posing for hours in different costumes and locations, have become popular with the country’s wealthier middle class.

Photograph destruction now accounts for more than 95 percent of Mr Liu’s work.

“Just send the photos over … and we will make them disappear completely, as if they had never existed,” Mr Liu says in a promotional video on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

His team spray-paint faces and identifying features before feeding the images into heavy-duty shredders.

They use sledgehammers to smash glass and wooden frames into pieces.

He then sends his customers a video of the destruction, set to a sometimes upbeat soundtrack, before removing the debris to a waste-to-energy facility where it becomes biofuel.

“All handled with responsibility,” Mr Liu told the Post, adding that some clients find “therapeutic value” in the service.