Paris officials are turning an urban problem into a public service: They’re selling the city’s “love locks” as souvenirs and donating the proceeds to refugee groups, The Guardian reports.
For traveling couples, the padlocks they affixed to the iron grills of the French city’s bridges, initials scrawled on the surface, were a symbol of romance. But to Parisian officials, they were a civil danger. Fearing that the locks would weaken overpasses like the Pont des Arts, they began dismantling the metal trinkets in 2015.
Left with one million padlocks (which totaled 65 metric tons of scrap metal), authorities needed a creative way to repurpose the waste. So they decided to sell 10 metric tons of locks to members of the public, marketing them as relics of the city’s bygone history.
“Members of the public can buy five or 10 locks, or even clusters of them, all at an affordable price,” Bruno Julliard, first deputy mayor of Paris, said in a statement quoted by The Guardian. “All of the proceeds will be given to those who work in support and in solidarity of the refugees in Paris.”
The sale is slated to take place in 2017, and it’s expected to raise as much as €100,000. As for the remainder of Paris’s love locks, they will be scrapped and sold.
Paris isn’t the only city that’s sick of its love locks. Last summer, the city of Portland, Maine, got rid of “Love Locks Fence”— a 30-foot chain link fence on the city’s Commercial Street—fearing the weight of the padlocks would weaken the fence and cause it to collapse. The plan is to replace it with a new, specially-designed fence, with a wave-like shape intended to make it harder for people to fasten padlocks to the barricade.
[h/t The Guardian]
December 6, 2016 – 5:30pm