It’s
what's left of the Tellier, a liquefied natural gas tanker built in the 1970s
that’s now being broken down for scrap metal.
The
top of the vessel has been completely cut away. Wyntin stands on the narrow,
jagged edge of the ship’s hull, 26 feet above the water, and looks down into
the nearly empty shell of the engine room.
“There
was about 55 or 60 tons of asbestos” in the ship, Wyntin says. “So that alone
took us seven to eight months, removal of asbestos."
Wyntin
says old ships like this can be full of asbestos and other toxic substances
that are expensive to remove safely. That’s one reason few big, privately-owned
ships are recycled in Europe nowadays.
In
his 18 years with the company, Wyntin says, “that’s the first big vessel I know
of that’s recycled in Europe.”
Instead,
most of the world’s big commercial ships are dismantled in South Asia — usually
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And not in shipyards, but on beaches, where
labor and environmental standards are notoriously bad.
European
environmental groups want to change that.
“The
beach is a natural habitat, and it is not compatible with the demolition of
ships,” says Jacky Bonnemain, of the Paris-based organization Robin des Bois.
Bonnemain
says because there are no tough international standards for ship breaking,
groups like his often turn to public pressure to have ships recycled
responsibly.
“For
us, the most important is to identify the owner of the ship,” Bonnemain says.
In
the case of the Tellier, Bonnemain says the owner, the French energy giant GDF
Suez, was more concerned than most about its image because it’s partly owned by
the French government.
“They
know that this ship, if it is sent to Asia, will create some bad publicity,”
Bonnemain says.
GDF
Suez did not respond when asked to comment for this story. Patrizia Heidegger,
of the advocacy group Shipbreaking Platform, would like to see more commercial
vessels recycled in Europe.
“Compared
to what we see in South Asia,” Heidegger says, “ship recycling in Europe is
green.”
But
for most ship owners, she says, where to recycle a ship boils down to how much
a recycler is willing to pay for it.
“They
just go for the biggest possible profit, wherever they can get it,” she says.
In
India and Bangladesh, where demand for scrap is booming and standards are lax,
old vessels fetch roughly $400 a ton, compared to about $100 in Europe, where
recyclers face high labor and environmental costs.
That
means with the Tellier weighing in at more than 10,000 tons, its owners may
have lost a boatload of money by recycling the ship in Belgium.
“If
they’re losing $300 per ton, they’re losing $3 million,” says Nikos Mikelis, of
Global Marketing Systems, one of the world’s largest buyers of ships headed for
demolition. “They’re not doing that happily.”
Mikelis
opposes efforts to recycle more vessels in Europe. Instead, he says, South
Asian recyclers can improve their beaching operations.
“It’s
not beaching that is the problem,” he says. “It’s the attitude to pollution.”
Until
last year, Mikelis was with the UN’s International Maritime Organization, where
he worked on a global agreement on ship breaking, known as the Hong Kong
Convention.
That
pact would tighten regulations for participating countries, but it hasn’t come
into force, and environmentalists say it doesn’t go far enough.
Meanwhile,
the European Union is finalizing its own regulations for European ships sent to
Asia. But Patrizia Heidegger of Shipbreaking Platform says those regulations
don’t go far enough, either. For one, she wants Europe to set up a fund to help
cover the cost of responsibly recycling ships.
She
says every ship should be forced to pay into that fund to at least partly cover
the price gap between South Asia and Europe.
It’s
that price gap that keeps Belgian ship recycler Peter Wyntin from competing
globally.
Wyntin
says his shipyard has the capacity to double the tonnage of ships it recycles
each year. And he wants South Asian recyclers to face the toughest regulations
possible. To begin with, he says, beaching should be banned.
“This
is something that is not acceptable anymore in the 21st century,” he says.
Wyntin
argues that would help level the playing field. And at the moment, his company
may need all the help it can get. With scrap metal prices at a low, he
ultimately expects to lose money on breaking up the Tellier.
Source:
21 October 2013
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