NGO Shipbreaking Platform Annual Report 2016
listed Greece as number one in World's Worst Shipping Nation followed by China.
It may be surprising for a country whose
industry is proud of green technology and engineering solutions, but in 2016
Germany was responsible for the worst shipbreaking practices amongst all
shipping nations when one compares the size of its fleet to the number of ships
broken irresponsibly.
German owners, banks and ship funds had a
staggering 97 ships rammed up on the beaches of South Asia out of a total of 99
vessels sold for demolition. That not being enough, close to 40% were broken in
Bangladesh, where conditions are known to be the worst.
Greece wasresponsible for the highest
absolute number of ships sold to South Asian shipbreaking yards: 104 ships in
total.
Since the Platform started to compile data in
2009, Greek shipping companies have unceasingly topped the list of owners that
opt for dirty and dangerous shipbreaking. Other major ship-owning countries
like Japan and South Korea sent nearly all of their old vessels for breaking in
substandard yards on the beaches of South Asia.
Chinese ship owners sold 43 of their Chinese
flagged end-of-life vessels to domestic ship recycling facilities, for which
they receive subsidies from their government, while still dumping more than
half of their old ships on beaches.
India sold all vessels to beaching
facilities, 13 out of 25 were sold to Pakistan and Bangladesh European ship
owners are responsible for more than one third of all ships sold for breaking.
The total number of EU-owned and/or EU-flagged vessels dismantled in 2016 worldwide
were 328: 274 of these ships, representing a jaw-dropping 84% of all European
end-of-life ships, ended up in either India, Pakistan or Bangladesh.
In terms of tonnage scrapped, European-owned
ships thus represented more than 40% of all end-of-life vessels scrapped on the
beaches.
Out of the 274 European vessels that were
beached, only 44 were still sailing under European flag. 19 Europeanflagged
vessels swapped their flag to a non-EU flag of convenience just weeks before
hitting the beach.
The most popular end-of-life flags amongst
all vessels scrapped on the beaches in 2016 were Panama, St Kitts and Nevis,
Liberia, Comoros, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Palau, St Kitts and Nevis and
Comoros are flags that are almost exclusively used by cash buyers at endof-life.
Source: marine link. 16 May 2017
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