Saying goes that diamonds are forever, which means everything else has to die at some point of time. Once it does, it is either used to create something else or left at the graveyard. Today, we are more interested in the things that won´t be used anymore, and will be left forever.
#1 Hidden diamonds
Speaking of diamonds; there is a field in Namibia that is closely connected with them. There are no diamonds there, but are machines used to find them. The field is owned by De Beers and all the machines there, just like many diamond mines, are his. There are just a few pictures from the site and there are two reasons why. The first one is that it is not safe for people to go there. It makes sense at first, but there are many similar graveyards that allow people to access them. The second reason why people are prohibited to visit it is the same reason why are they still there. It would make more sense to just dismantle the machines and reuse the parts, but they are held there for a good reason. There is a possibility that there are some diamonds still stuck in parts of the machines. It is just unknown why they haven´t been searched and dismantled yet.
#2 I will just leave it there
Ships are big and made of loads of metal and they usually don´t go to the ship graveyard. All that metal is stripped down and reused to build new things. Still, there is a ship graveyard in the city of Mauritania. Although being the country´s commercial center the city is best known for being the location of the largest ship graveyard in the world. So, why don´t they then use the metal from them like any other ship graveyard? Because it is not actually a graveyard, it is just a place that has many abandoned ships. The reason for that is that harbor officers were taking bribe to allow the ships to stay in the harbor and the bay. After some time the harbor became popular among ship owners that had ships to get rid of.
#3 Waiting to be cut
The real ship graveyard is actually a place where ships get dismanteled. The biggest is located in Pakistan and it dismantles about one hundred ships a year. It makes about one million tons of steel. They accept only tankers and cruise liners and nothing smaller than that. The interesting and sad thing is that all the ships there are dismantled using just hand tools. There are hundreds of workers and all the job is done with little or no help from heavy machinery.
#4 Forever anchored
The next thing on the list is not big or special machine; still it has its own graveyard. It is actually an important part from the ships mentioned earlier. I am talking about anchor graveyard. There is no real reason why anchors should have a graveyard but there is a sentimental one. It is located in Portugal and was built to honor the tradition of tuna fishing with large nets. An entire island that holds the anchors now, once was a place devoted to the tuna fishing. Now, the tunas left the coast of the island and the anchors are there to remember the times when tuna fishing offered a job to many people.
#5 Don´t throw my vending machine away
In the quest to find strange, final resting places for machines I managed to find one that shouldn´t exist. The anchors are there to honor the memory of tuna fishing, but why exactly is there a vending machine graveyard in Japan? The only information I managed to find out was that the graveyard exists. There are many sources that confirm it´s existence but not a single one that states the purpose of having such a thing.
#6 No more flying
The most popular big machines graveyard is the one that holds airplanes. The reason why they are not dismantled and reused is unknown. Everything that was in them when they were out of the factory still is. There are so many still useful and working materials in them that it is sad to just watch them rust. The airplane graveyards are mostly located in deserts and hold hundreds to thousands of decommissioned airplanes. The ones that are in the airplane industry like to say that the reason for having the graveyards is from a sentimental value than the real one. I believe there is an economical reason too.
