Cash buyer Global Marketing Systems (GMS) has challenged the European
Commission’s intention to ban ship demolition on beaches and has asked
officials to check for themselves the condition of Indian shipyards.
Addressing a high-level industry conference in London, Nikos Mikelis,
non-executive director of GMS, said ship recycling yards were improving in
south east Asia.
He invited the Commission and a major representative group of top level
shipping industry stakeholders to India, to witness the recycling process first
hand at one of the country’s best yards.
The EU’s first technical interpretation draft says shipbreaking must be
done from an impermeable floor and that could mean beaching is not permitted.
Mikelis said that while progress was being made in Indian yards, it could
“come to an abrupt end through the ill-advised efforts to ban ship recycling by
beaching through the Unit of Waste Management of the European Commission’s
Directorate-General for the Environment”.
He added: “We can only hope that the administrations of right-thinking
European states will avert the tragic mistake that has been brewing in Brussels
through the regulator’s lack of understanding on international shipping and
ship recycling.”
GMS also used the conference to call on Panama and the Marshall Islands
to accede to the Hong Kong convention for the safe and environmentally sound
recycling of ships.
Source: tradewinds news. 5
November 2014
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