In one corner of the factory, a copper still is being prepared for shipping.
As the commercial hub of the industrial Meuse Valley, Liège developed iron and steel foundries, glassworks, coal mines, armament factories, and copper refineries.
Osnabrück is a major rail junction with factories processing copper and producing machinery, motor-vehicle equipment, chemicals, textiles, synthetic materials, and paper.
"They see stealing things that used to belong to the government, like copper factories, or any factory, as no problem," said the rebel commander.
They were moved into a former office building and laboratory that was part of an abandoned copper factory.
"Maybe old people associate it with the gulag," said Yuri M. Filatov, the director of Norilsk Nickel's copper factory, when asked about the prisoners who built it.
That steel flows into the skyscrapers sprouting all around Chinese cities and into new factory towns; the copper is used to wire the millions of houses being built for China's new middle class.
In order to establish the validity of the proposed method, it has been applied for the determination of trace amounts of Pb II), Ni II), Cd II), Cu II), and Cr III) in wastewaters from Sarcheshmeh Copper factory and Yazd sewage treatment plant and herbal samples (black tea, mushroom, and lettuce).
Many of the posts criticising officials involved in a recent student-led protest against the construction of a copper factory in Shifang in Sichuan province were deleted, although by no means all - an indication of how social media has created new space for debate in Chinese society.
Those broken lights, for example, may turn up in Guangdong province where factories salvage the copper wire and melt the stripped plastic into new slipper soles.
Even before the Curved Dash Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line, in 1901, becoming the first mass-produced American car, Detroit was a showplace of labor, its huge factories producing iron, copper, freight cars, ships, pharmaceuticals, and beer.
