Nearpara Rubber Company: From Tire Reclaiming to Toxic Brownfield

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The Last Days of Nearpara Rubber I smelled it before I saw anything worth photographing. That warm, faintly sweet bite of old rubber, the kind that hits you somewhere between a tire shop and a summer highway, drifted through the first building the moment I stepped inside. The structure was burned out, charred and broken, rubble underfoot. But the smell was alive. And then I saw the pile. In the corner of the room, faded brown and heaped maybe two feet high, was a mound of baby bottle nipples. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of the small rubber tips, just sitting on the floor of a collapsed industrial building in Trenton, New Jersey. I stood there for a moment, genuinely confused, and then kept moving. Nothing like the smell of warmed-over rubber. Twenty minutes later, I understood even less. Through another door passage, I found the main source of the smell: six open metal trailer containers, still loaded with bagged baby bottle nipples, sitting in open air. Bags of them, mountains of bagged n...
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BEWARE of Vintage Lens Fungus



A fallen Yashica ML 50mm 1:2

























One thing to be aware of when purchasing from Flea Bay (eBay) and other places is looking for any instances of fungus matter inside the lens elements. It can be either in the front or the back. You can't clean fungus easily with these lenses since the cost to have them cleaned is not proportionate to how much they cost. The expense is more than the purchase price. Nothing makes you feel worse than a huge spot of fungus or the beginning of fungus growth. So make sure you double-check and look over more than twice over pictures by sellers online and in person.









There are remedies out there that say you can destroy it by placing the lens on a windowsill and letting the sun take care of it. This can be met with some success but in actuality may cause the lubrication on the aperture blades to run or even leak causing the aperture mechanism to stick and lock up rendering it useless.
















So take these words of wisdom and inspect lens merch with care.

Gratitude.


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