Brussels
-- A new EU Regulation on ship recycling has been voted yesterday by the
European Council, and already approved by the European Parliament. The NGO
Shipbreaking Platform and European Environmental Bureau (EEB), and the more
than 160 environmental, human and labour rights organisations they represent,
denounce the regulation for effectively postponing and possibly ridding the EU
with its responsibility to provide solutions to the global shipbreaking crisis.
The NGO coalition warns that the Regulation will fail to change the current
state of play.
European
shipping interests will continue to make significant financial profits by
externalizing environmental and human health costs to the shipbreaking beaches
of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and to the exploited workforce there. The
regulation may direct a very limited scope of ships registered under an EU flag
to “green” listed ship recycling facilities, those that are built to adequately
contain hazardous materials – an effective ban on the breaking of EU flagged
ships on tidal beaches.
Beaching
sites will not be approved for EU listing, which prevents EU flagged ships from
being beached. But, large shipping nations such as Greece, Malta, Cyprus
blocked additional measures proposed by the European Parliament to strengthen
the Regulation, such as ensuring traceability of hazardous wastes dumped in
developing countries and clearly linking liability for these wastes to the
polluter, who in this case is the shipowner.
So
the regulation does nothing to prevent shipowners from jumping register to a
non-EU flag prior to sending their ships for breaking in order to avoid falling
under the requirements of the new EU law. In fact, the Regulation may even have
the unintended effect of shrinking the number of ships registered under an EU
flag, and therefore making the Regulation counterproductive to other EU
initiatives aimed at building a more robust EU fleet.
Conflicting with existing conventions
According
to NGO Shipbreaking Platform, the new ship recycling Regulation conflicts with
the United Nations Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous
Wastes and Their Disposal and the Basel Ban Amendment, both of which are
instruments that have been ratified and implemented into the national
legislation of all EU Member States via the European Waste Shipment Regulation,
and of which the latter forbids the export of hazardous wastes from the EU to
non-OECD countries. Article 29 of the law on ship recycling adopted yesterday
removes hazardous waste ships from the scope of application of the European
Waste Shipment Regulation.
“We
fear that the Regulation will end up applying to very few ships” said Jeremy
Wates, Secretary General of the EEB. “Unless an economic incentive for all
ships calling at EU ports is rapidly introduced, circumvention of the law will
persist, and the European shipping industry will continue to be at the heart of
scandals involving severe pollution of coastal zones and exploitation of
vulnerable workers in developing countries,” he added.
Source: recycling portal.
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