I
Iron Flatline
Guest
Weird day. I posted this pretty much as is on my photoblog, but thought I'd share here, too.
I'm back in Berlin for four days, just got in from LA on Thursday. Someone wanted to show me a 'Great Investment Opportunity' so I spent my Saturday hammering down the Autobahn in a very nice E55.
Just outside of Dresden someone built one of those massive killing machines. You put a pig or a cow (they did both!) in on one end, and on the other side comes out cold-cuts, sausages, and everything else you can imagine. The parts that don't get used - teeth, hair, bones, etc - get incinerated to make some of the energy. ....very efficient.
(gag!)
They have flash freezers, long-term storage, and even their own water purification, so they can keep using the same water to hose down the blood and intestines.
(double-gag)
The images look pretty sterile, because what is missing are all the ceiling-hung chain saws and wheeled meat-troughs.
Anyway, the place is shut-down, as it is completely bancrupt. They got hundreds of millions of Euros from the state to create work in the old East Germany, and as soon as the subsidies ran out, they shut the place down. That's why all the equipment has already been sold off.
Now some guy wants to turn it into a garbage sorting place - plastic, metal, glass, etc. The place is for sale for around 3% of the original value, and they STILL can't put together the funding to make it work.
It was a total waste of a day. I know nothing about any of these businesses, and am not about to commit time to learn how to sluce pig-guts down some drain.
But let me tell you: the place stank of blood and death. Apparently there is NO WAY to ever remove the smell of 5,000 animals a day getting slaughtered and turned into various foods. I've been back at my temporary apartment for a couple of hours now, and I can still smell the place. I will need to get my sweater dry-cleaned.
This being the dark side, I thought you might enjoy some of the images. I will work up a few more, and post them. I had only my little snap-shot camera, so many of the images ended up too soft (due to low-light camera-shake) but some got the atmosphere just right:
I'm back in Berlin for four days, just got in from LA on Thursday. Someone wanted to show me a 'Great Investment Opportunity' so I spent my Saturday hammering down the Autobahn in a very nice E55.
Just outside of Dresden someone built one of those massive killing machines. You put a pig or a cow (they did both!) in on one end, and on the other side comes out cold-cuts, sausages, and everything else you can imagine. The parts that don't get used - teeth, hair, bones, etc - get incinerated to make some of the energy. ....very efficient.
(gag!)
They have flash freezers, long-term storage, and even their own water purification, so they can keep using the same water to hose down the blood and intestines.
(double-gag)
The images look pretty sterile, because what is missing are all the ceiling-hung chain saws and wheeled meat-troughs.
Anyway, the place is shut-down, as it is completely bancrupt. They got hundreds of millions of Euros from the state to create work in the old East Germany, and as soon as the subsidies ran out, they shut the place down. That's why all the equipment has already been sold off.
Now some guy wants to turn it into a garbage sorting place - plastic, metal, glass, etc. The place is for sale for around 3% of the original value, and they STILL can't put together the funding to make it work.
It was a total waste of a day. I know nothing about any of these businesses, and am not about to commit time to learn how to sluce pig-guts down some drain.
But let me tell you: the place stank of blood and death. Apparently there is NO WAY to ever remove the smell of 5,000 animals a day getting slaughtered and turned into various foods. I've been back at my temporary apartment for a couple of hours now, and I can still smell the place. I will need to get my sweater dry-cleaned.
This being the dark side, I thought you might enjoy some of the images. I will work up a few more, and post them. I had only my little snap-shot camera, so many of the images ended up too soft (due to low-light camera-shake) but some got the atmosphere just right:
