Whatever happened to China’s giant piles of abandoned bicycles?

A delivery rider rests on a scooter next to a stack of shared bicycles on a sidewalk in Beijing. The sheer volume of abandoned bikes is overwhelming. One government unit estimates there were as many as 20 million shared bikes in use in 2017. — AFP

Remember those colourful mountains of metal in China after its bike-sharing boom went bust in 2017? Ever wondered what happened to them? Here’s how you recycle bicycles.

The problem