Researcher(s): Audrey Mayer, S. M. Mizanur Rahman
Institution: Michigan Technological University
Sustainable Ship-Recycling in Bangladesh
This project will improve the sustainability
of the ship-recycling industry in Bangladesh, where millions of tons of metal
are recovered from hundreds of beached container ships, oil tankers, and cruise
liners annually. We will investigate how recycled metal flows through the metal
smith community in Dhaka, and identify improvements that reduce environmental
impacts and maintain social networks.
Why This Project Is Important:
Every
year, thousands of container ships, oil tankers, and cruise liners are beached
on the shores of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to be broken down and
recycled. In Bangladesh alone, the beaching of hundreds of massive ships
contributes over 70% of the country’s metal resources, but contaminates the
environment and food resources with heavy metals, oil, and asbestos. The
magnitude of the flow of used ships to these coastlines illustrates the global
scale of humanity's consumption of oil and resources, and its consequences for
the poorest among us. While the metal from the ships represents a critical
resource for a growing population in Bangladesh, the manner in which these
ships are dismantled (by hand with ropes and blow torches) is damaging to
people's health and their environment. Our project will use theories from a
field called "industrial ecology" to try to improve the economic,
social, and environmental dynamics of this ship-recycling industry, to ensure
that it is truly sustainable.
Project Description
There
are about 200-300 ships beached in the Chittagong (Bangladesh) shipbreaking
yards each year, providing around 1.5 million tons of scrap ferrous metal, more
than 70% of the country’s steel demand. Over 20,000 people work as day laborers
in the industry, at over 10,000 small and medium business engaged in processing
these metals into final products. Bangladesh is assumed to be second largest
country, after India, in the world that rips the ships apart. Despite these
dynamics, few studies have investigated the social aspects of the industry, and
no study has tracked the material flow of the industry across the country.
Scrap
metals from the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh are drawn from Chittagong
(where the retired ships are beached) to a community in the capital city Dhaka,
five hundred miles away from Chittagong, for further processing. We hypothesize
that the relationships among the members of the Dhaka community (and between
Dhaka and Chittagong) dictates resource flows. Based on previous studies, we
know that metal-working skill, familial and social ties, and long-term
reciprocal business relationships can restrain an individual’s competitive
mentality and encourage cooperation, and hence resource sharing.
This
study will focus on two issues; tracking scrap ferrous metal flows and
analyzing the community’s social relations with respect to those resource
flows. We will conduct this research by interviewing two groups of people:
metal resource contractors of the ship breaking industry (the people who move
the metal from the ship breaking yards to the metal workers), and metal working
business owners in the Dhaka community (the people who turn the scrap metal
into products such as rebar for building construction).
We
are expecting to conduct about fifty interviews, each of which may last for
about an hour. Our questions will largely focus on the level of family ties
among businesses, level of reciprocity, resource processing and collection
methods, etc. Interviews will be conducted in the local Bangla language. They
will be recorded, transcribed, coded, and then analyzed using qualitative and
quantitative methods to understand the level of social relations and
cooperation involved and the extent responsible for metal flow direction. We
will also interview people who either control the purchase of ships or the
distribution of metal recovered from the ships into the metal smith
communities. We will trace the amount of metal they distribute by weights and
by element on an annual basis. To understand the distribution of metals beyond
these key informants, we will largely depend on the intermediaries of those who
maintain contacts and orders with both the ship-breaking contractors and the
small and medium firm owners of metals recycling businesses. Those people will
be identified through interviews of community business people and metal
contractors. Finally, we expect to contact local and regional government
officials and statistical officials to find data that is relevant to the metal
distribution, as well as relevant laws and programs for the industry.
Source: superior ideas.
No comments:
Post a Comment