EU to ban owners from scrapping ships on South Asian beaches
European, Turkish and Chinese recyclers are set to benefit from strict new EU rules on breaking up old ships, but the practice of dismantling them on beaches in South Asia – at great human and environmental cost – will still be hard to stop.
Of 1,026 ocean-going ships recycled in 2014, 641 were taken apart on beaches in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, according to figures from the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, which campaigns for an end to the hazardous practice.
Tankers, cruise liners and other old vessels are rammed onto beaches and stripped down by hundreds of unskilled workers using simple tools such as blowtorches. Chemicals leak into the ocean when the tide comes in.
There is also a human cost: the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai estimates that some 470 workers have died in the past 20 years in accidents in Alang-Sosiya, the world’s largest stretch of ship-breaking beaches, in Gujarat.
Some 35,000 mostly migrant and unskilled workers operate there. The new rules aim to stop what Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for the Environment and Maritime Affairs, called “the shameful practice of European ships being dismantled on beaches”.
They will require that EU-registered ships be recycled only at sustainable facilities, and a list of these is expected to be published next year. It is likely to include yards in China, Turkey, North America and the European Union, but not South Asia.
“The European list will split the market into a safe market and a substandard market,” said Patrizia Heidegger of Shipbreaking Platform.