In 2012 more than 1300
ocean-going ships were sold for breaking. Only a minority of these end-of-life
vessels were handled in a safe, sustainable manner. About two thirds of the
ships were simply run ashore on tidal beaches in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
A look at how ship recycling can become cleaner and safer.
The fatal accident on
board of the Union Brave, a tanker beached in Alang in India last year is a
tragic example of ship disposal malpractise. The vessel belonged to the London-based
company Union Maritime, an owner and operator of chemical tankers, which
promotes its expertise in 'clean petroleum products trade'. On 6 October, an
explosion shook the ship lying on the tidal flats.
Most probably, explosive
gases inside the tanks were not properly detected before the workers started to
cut the ship apart.
Since 2007, India
requires all imported scrap vessels to carry a 'Gas Free for Hot Work'
certificate. Either the Union Brave was never tested, or the certificate was
not based on proper testing. Six workers died instantly, one more seriously
injured man succumbed to his injuries after a long journey to hospital. There
are no adequate medical facilities in Alang.
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| Shipbreaking yard at Gadani |
No
Safety for Workers
In the South Asian
shipbreaking countries, authorities do not strictly enforce existing
environmental and safety rules. Only after campaigns by non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) in Europe, North America and South Asia, did the
responsible governments start to seek regulation for the yards. Still, the day
labourers who cut the ships apart are usually unskilled and often not trained
to properly use personal protective equipment (PPE).
With regards to
hazardous materials, not enough care is given to the protection of workers'
health and safety. In short, due to the lack of heavy lifting equipment, poor
training of workers and foremen, inadequate measures to prevent falls from
heights and the disregard for PPEs, accidents and exposure to hazardous
substances are a major threat to workers.
Although there is no
official documentation of injuries and fatalities in the yards and information
is restricted, our local contact in Bangladesh counted at least 22 deaths last
year alone in accidents in which workers fell from great heights, were crushed
under metal plates or killed in explosions. Taking into consideration that the
Chittagong shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh directly employ up tO20,000 workers
and that many more workers die in accidents and as a result of occupational
diseases, the death toll makes it one of the most dangerous jobs in Bangladesh.
Safety standards vary
enormously between the shipbreaking yards in South Asia and ship recycling
facilities elsewhere in the world, where adequate PPEs are provided, their use
is enforced, workers are trained and their health regularly checked. The
situation is better in ship recycling yards in China and Turkey, the two other
major destinations for end-of-life vessels. Both countries have prohibited the
beaching method and display a higher grade of mechanisation. Working conditions
are therefore less dangerous.
Asbestos
removal
A major challenge in
shipbreaking operations is the removal of asbestos. Asbestos was used widely in
shipbuilding and can be found in different parts of the structure on board a
ship. Ship recycling experts report that even newly built ships are still not
100% asbestos-free, even if the use of the material is outlawed in ship
building. According to the standards of the International Labour Organisation
(ILO), workers need to be fully protected with the use of masks and protective
respiratory equipment.
However, in many
shipbreaking yards in South Asia, workers remove asbestos with their hands and
are only protected with gloves, as we witnessed in Pakistan last December. They
are totally unaware of the dangers of asbestos and are unable to distinguish it
from other insulation material. As a consequence, they breathe in asbestos
fibres, carry them away in their clothes and even into their homes. Studies
have shown that high numbers of workers suffer from asbestos-related diseases
and respiratory problems.
Doctors in Bangladesh
are not trained to recognise asbestos-related diseases. A recent pilot study in
Bangladesh has shown that it is nearly impossible to measure the impact of the
deadly fibre. Workers are not registered and cannot be found after they have
left a yard. There are neither regular health checks nor any other
documentation and yard owners were reluctant to cooperate with the medical
researchers.
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| Shipbreaking in Chittagong |
Get
Off the Beach!
Shipbreaking should not
take place directly on beaches. As long as shipbreaking is practiced on the
sandy or muddy beaches, full containment of pollutants and the adequate
management of hazardous wastes will not be possible.
Moreover, the beaches
prevent the use of heavy lifting gear in order to make work safer and less
laborious for the workers. Finally, the beaching method does not allow for
adequate emergency response as vehicles cannot reach a vessel stuck in mud or
sand.
The Basel Convention on
the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal,
particularly its guidelines on ship dismantling, has proposed a move away from
the beach to stabile structures. Nearly all major ship owning countries, as
well as the shipbreaking countries in South Asia, have ratified the treaty.
However, we do not see any structural change, even if some minor improvements
haven been achieved.
There are other cleaner
and safer methods for ship recycling. Turkey practices the landing method,
where ships are partly pulled ashore and then dismantled both from floating and
land-based cranes. Smaller metal pieces are cut down on an impermeable floor in
order to avoid the leakage of pollutants into the water and the sediments.
A second method
practiced in China is the pier-side method. The vessel is moored along a quay
and dismantled by cranes from top to bottom. Once only the lower part of the
hull is left, it is torn onto a slipway, which can be closed off from the
waterside in order to prevent spills. This method is used by most of the modern
yards.
Finally, there is the
possibility to use a dry dock for ship recycling. Some Chinese and British
facilities use this method, which is the safest and cleanest. However, ship
owners mainly choose the most lucrative methods in order to retrieve the
biggest possible profit from the sale of their end-of-life vessel - beaching.
Why
ships are hazardous
The ships' structures
contain toxic materials such as asbestos, heavy metals, organotins, the
extremely toxic organic tin compound tributyltin (TBT) used in anti-fouling
paints, polychlorinated organic compounds (PCBs), by-products of combustion
such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins and furans. A lot of
these hazardous substances can be released into the environment, contaminating
seawater, sediments and the air.
A 2010 World Bank report
titled The Ship Breaking and Recycling Industry in Bangladesh and Pakistan
described widespread soil contamination in Bangladesh and Pakistan with
deposits of cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury. Asbestos erspecially would
remain a significant long-term problem and PCBs would still occur in older
vessels and naval vessels, the report argued. It found that heavy metals in
paints pollute the work environment and that large volumes of oil and oily
water should be properly managed.
Apart from
contamination, shipbreaking causes further environmental damage. In Bangladesh,
10,000 mangrove trees - planted with the help of the international community to
protect the coast from cyclones - were cut down illegally to make space for the
yards. Studies have shown that biodiversity has decreased sharply along the
Chittagong coast in Bangladesh, risking the livelihoods of fishermen.
Moreover, researchers
estimate that Bangladesh would accumulate millions of tonnes of hazardous waste
from shipbreaking between 2010 and 2013, including 79,000 tonnes of asbestos,
240,000 tonnes of PCBs, mainly from cables, 210,000 tonnes of ozone-depleting
substances, 69,200 tonnes of paints containing heavy metals, TBT and PCBs, 678
tonnes of heavy metals, nearly two million cubic meters of liquid organic waste
and a million tonnes of other hazardous wastes.
International Waste Law
In international
environmental law, especially under the waste law regime of the Basel Convention,
end-of-life vessels are considered hazardous waste. Their transboundary
movement therefore falls under the obligation of Prior Informed Consent (PIC)
and should be reduced between developed and developing countries.
The European Union has
even transposed the Basel Ban Amendment, which prohibits any export to
developing countries, into community law. As a consequence, no end-of-life
vessels from Europe should reach a beach in South Asia. However, shipowners
circumvent the law by not informing authorities about their intent to sell a
vessel, but handing it over once they are outside the EU or on the high seas.
In some cases, even if
ships are directly exported from an EU port, the responsible authorities do not
intervene to stop the export.
As the Basel Convention
and law derived from it, is regularly circumvented by ship owners, the state
parties to the Convention asked the International Maritime Organisation (IMO)
to develop a new international treaty focussing on ship recycling. States
adopted the Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound
Recycling of Ships in 2009, which will be a legally binding treaty. The IMO has
developed further guidance, such as the 2012 Guidelines for ship recycling
facilities.
However, the Convention
has not yet entered into force, as it has not been ratified by the required
number of States, and will most probably not do so in the next decade.
Therefore, the Convention does little to change the situation in a reasonable
time span. Even worse, ship owners have found a fig leaf to hide behind.
Impotent
EU Regulators
Despite international
law, most end-of-life vessels still end up in substandard facilities. The EU
has long recognised its responsibility to contribute to change. Former
Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas announced in April 2006 that the EU had
an important role to play in finding solutions for responsible ship recycling.
The European Commission (EC) published a promising Green Paper and a Strategy
and the European Parliament urged the Commission to act.
In March 2012, the EC
finally published a proposal for a new regulation on ship recycling. The
regulation seeks to implement the Hong Kong Convention and to add several
higher standards for EU-flagged vessels. Recycling facilities that intend to
take in EU-flagged vessels have to be listed by the EU as being compliant. The
Shipbreaking Platform sharply criticised the draft as it did not introduce any
economic incentive to choose responsible ship recycling. Without any financial
mechanism, the regulation will have little impact.
The proposed ship
recycling fund, introduced by the European Parliament's rapporteur on the
issue, Carl Schlyter offered the potential to address this situation. However,
despite a clear majority in the Environment Committee, the Parliament voted
down the fund in plenary after heavy lobbying both from the shipowners
associations and EU ports.
Instead of including the
mechanism in the regulation, the Parliament asked the Commission to develop a
model to internalise costs for clean and safe ship recycling. That is, there
will be further delays of many years.
The regulation will only
put obligations on EU-flagged ships - a small percentage of all EU-owned ships
as most ships fly flags of convenience (FOC) during their last voyage. NGOs are
afraid that the regulation will be a further invitation for ship owners to use
FOCs.
An
economic incentive for real change
NGOs have been promoting
a mandatory economic incentive for clean and safe ship recycling for years to
internalise the costs, to discourage the reflagging of end-of-life vessels to
avoid European regulations and to implement an individual ship owner
responsibility scheme which encourages green ship design.
The 'Polluter-Pays
Principle' or cost internalisation is at the core of environmental policies on
waste management of the EU, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Under a financial
mechanism the costs of proper management of hazardous wastes will be borne by
those profiting from ships during their lifecycle instead of externalising them
to vulnerable countries. Even if the EU needs to take further measures to
prevent the out-flagging of European-owned ships, a financial mechanism
covering all ships calling at EU ports would discourage re-flagging.
The polluter pays
principle should not be seen as a 'polluter pollutes and then pays to pollute
principle'. In this case, the pollution stems from the original decisions to produce
ships using toxic materials. Therefore, an effective solution needs a driver to
prevent the use of hazardous materials in new ship design or for those ships
already made, a driver to have them pre-cleaned during their useful life.
While the Hong Kong
Convention in its Preamble cites the Substitution Principle, which requires
alternatives to hazardous substances to be used where possible, the Convention
contains no actual measures to implement this. If financial burdens are
decreased for ships containing less hazardous materials and for those that are
designed for ease of recycling, it would drive green design and pre-cleaning.
A study published in
January this year by the Dutch economic consultancy Profundo argued that
different models for such a mechanism were economically and legally feasible..
The
ship recycling fund
The European Parliament
has mainly discussed the model of a ship recycling fund. All ships calling at
EU ports would need to pay a fee into the fund, which would then disburse
premiums for safe and sound ship recycling in carefully vetted EU-listed
facilities. This should eliminate the price gap where ship owners obtain the
highest prices for their end-of-life ships. The model also foresaw annual fees
for ships with regular port calls such as ferries.
The Parliament
commissioned an impact assessment, which indicated that a levy on all ships
calling at EU ports, had the potential to meet the three objectives. The
assessment estimated that a fund would need to pay between €20 and €50 per light
displacement tonne to cover the price gap for safe recycling and that the levy
on ships calling at EU ports to support such a fund would need to be in a range
of €0.01 to €0.025 per gross tonne.
It concluded that the
levy would have a very limited impact on the price of goods. As European
lawmakers were afraid to implement such a mechanism, and were strongly
pressurised by the maritime sector to vote the idea down, all eyes are now on
the European Commission, which has been tasked with developing a more detailed
model for a financial mechanism to enable the clean and safe recycling of
ships.
Patrizia Heidegger is
executive director of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, an NGO which seeks to
prevent shipbreaking on tidal beaches and promotes clean and safe ship
recycling.
Source:
Waste Management World. By Patrizia Heidegger.
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