[mschuster91]

> plants from before the war, WW1 in one case

JFC. I get why this is profitable, these machines have been written off financially a century ago and have been money printers ever since for that reason, but this kind of behavior should be seriously penalized - it makes competition for new companies really hard (because they have to pay down the value for new machines), and it's bad for the environment as a whole because if they're still running the same motors and control units from back then, then they are wasting a lot of electricity, most likely also emit a lot more toxic effluents than a plant with modern emission controls and mitigations would, and most likely run at lower yield rates than modern processes so they're wasting more raw materials.

[hef19898]

The machines were old, control equipement was / is newish. The same stuff would be impossible to produce on new plants in Germany, environmental restrictions are too strict. Kazachstan, India and China are the places to go. And even China didn't want that dirty shit anymore. The old sites work because they operated for ages.