A good deal of verbal dynamism from both sides of the shipbreaking fence characterised proceedings at the TradeWinds Ship Recycling Forum 2011 in Dubai.
Few topics at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) in the past 20 years have stirred up emotions like ship scrapping.
The safety of ro-ro vessels after the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster and Marpol rules following the Prestige tanker spill are certainly up there.
But many other conventions or amendments come and go without the same verbal dynamism that has typified the still-to-be-ratified Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships.
It has been a slow burner but the colourful language, entrenched opinions and global spread of interests surrounding the subject manifested themselves once again at TradeWinds’s Ship Recycling Forum in Dubai last week.
The fact is that it is a human-interest story as much as one about money.
High steel prices mean owners can pocket a tidy $10m for their superannuated capesize bulkers or $16m for a VLCC but end-of-life ships are controversial because of the catalogue of deaths, injuries and illnesses suffered in the past by those dismantling them.
The forum this year clearly indicated growing support in the industry for the new Hong Kong Convention aimed at raising the safety and environmental bar — a “single international standard”, be it in Pakistan, India, China, Bangladesh or Turkey.
The truth is there will never be a single standard but at least it is a starting point from which the industry can progress and that includes the responsibilities of shipowners and shipbuilders, as well as the breakers. Conventions, as the Prestige and Marpol have demonstrated, are organic and interpreted differently depending on individual countries.
The Dubai forum was bound to be biased in favour of current scrapping methods, simply because too many people have vested interests and the gathering attracts a lot of recyclers and others who earn their living from the sector.
Certainly, environmental pressure group the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking has a case for the banning of beaching based on photographs of human misery.
But in Dubai, both industry and more independent voices put a very different spin on the reality of shipbreaking, the improvements that are said to have been made in India and the tens of thousands of jobs generated directly and indirectly.
Not least was professor Nicky Gregson from the UK’s University of Sheffield, who looked at research between 2008 and 2010 into links between shipbreaking in Bangladesh and the wider economy.
The business is concentrated in Chittagong (and on similar small foreshores in India and Pakistan) for clear reasons, she said, such as abundant cheap labour, demand for steel and shelving beaches that have a wide tidal range.
The industry, conceded Gregson, has a reputation for not caring about people and the environment but also provides lots of employment both on and off the mud flats.
The main motor remains Bangladesh’s dependency on ship plates for rerolling mills, which took slightly over three million tonnes of scrap from the yards in 2009.
Beyond the foreshore there also exists a big waste-exchange industry, from fittings for reuse in the Bangladesh coastal fleet to the re-engineering of equipment, and the provision of hundreds of thousands of boards for manufacturing furniture.
“It powers entrepreneurial dreams in Bangladesh,” said Gregson, while acknowledging the “downside” connections such as the production of potentially hazardous asbestos board, which is still legal in Southern Asia.
Grazia Cioci, acting director and policy advisor to the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking, was quick to pick up on the deforestation of areas to provide space for recycling yards, as well as the threat to fish and to nearby fishing villages.
She had been to Bangladesh and produced photos from 2010 of partly submerged vessel sections — an attempt to spike the guns of opponents who accuse environmentalists of peddling old and irrelevant images simply to scaremonger.
Mohammed Zahirul Islam, director of PHP Shipbreaking & Recycling Industries in Chittagong, interjected several times to complain how the nine-month court ban on recycling in Bangladesh, which was lifted this week, has forced up the price of steel in the country, affecting especially jobs in the construction industry, where infrastructure growth has slowed.
Only a fraction of the 15,000 workers at his yard remained employed, with around 100,000 laid off by recyclers overall.
“How do you rehabilitate these poor people?” he asked Cioci. “Do you have a plan to solve it?”
Soledad Blanco, director of international affairs in the European Commission (EC)’s Directorate General for the Environment, said European Union (EU) vessels produce 86,000 tonnes of hazardous waste each year, with the majority of ships dismantled in substandard facilities using substandard practices.
She showed a recent satellite image showing oil leaking into the water and followed up by talking about the difficulty in documenting the scale of diseases suffered by workers, and the responsibility of EU countries, whose owners account for around 40% of the world fleet and whose flags fly above roughly 25% of all ships.
Blanco added that an “impossible” situation existed because it remains easy to circumvent the EU’s Waste Shipment Regulation, based on the Basel Convention and Ban Amendment.
“As parties to the Basel Convention, we supported development of the Hong Kong Convention because it was clear it would provide a global convention covering the life cycle of ships.” she said. “The EC has welcomed its adoption and we are trying to convince our member states to participate.”
Blanco said the EC is also looking at the treatment of ships not covered by the Hong Kong Convention, primarily smaller tonnage, and the potential establishment of a list of “green” recycling facilities globally, based on the convention.
Claude Wohrer from the French Secretariat General for the Sea, added: “We have to ratify the Hong Kong Convention as soon as possible.” She also raised again the idea of a recycling fund financed by ships calling at EU ports.
France was one of just five countries to sign the May 2009 Hong Kong Convention (a statement of intent) but it has still to formally ratify. No country has to date.
Cioci argued long and hard that the Basel Convention was the only instrument to stop the movement of toxic waste from developed to developing countries, although she was very much a solitary voice in an industry-dominated room.
The campaigner’s argument is that vessels could be pre-cleaned of toxic materials, possibly as much as 90%-plus, and still remain seaworthy for towing to Southern Asia for recycling.
She secured some support from Tom Peter Blankestijn, director of Maersk Ship Recycling, which handles “green” recycling in China of in-house and third-party vessels.
“Maersk has a policy of non-beaching, as does China, where the death rate dismantling alongside quays is zero,” he claimed.
Beaches are definitely not constructed for ship scrapping, he said, while questioning whether 25 years of sludge can be cleaned from a vessel fast enough to beat the twice-daily tides. Neither was he convinced about recycling in a dry dock.
Anil Sharma of cash buyer Global Marketing Systems accepted that the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking was a necessary participant in debating the rights and wrongs of recycling but suggested that its insistence on pre-cleaning ships prior to export left it stuck in the “starting gates”.
“Maybe you should hire some really strong technical people,” he suggested to Cioci.
Serious or not, forum chairman Nikos Mikelis interjected: “I could offer you my services.”
By Geoff Garfield
Dubai
10 March 2011
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