EU: A European
environmental agency has weighed into the confusion over an interpretation of
the EU ship recycling regulations.
The regulation's
Article 13 has caused uproar among south Asia's beach-based ship recyclers and
their stakeholders. The article requires "built structures" and
"impermeable floors with drainage systems". This is understood by
breakers to require the construction of expensive, complex structures on the
breaking beaches.
But, speaking to
IHS Maritime, OVAM, the Flemish Public Waste Agency (Openbare Vlaamse
Afvalstoffenmaatschappij), said a built structure "can" refer to
"roads and access ways needed to operate heavy machinery… It does not mean
dry docks."
Impermeable
flooring, said OVAM, "refers to those places where hazardous waste is
being stored and possibly segregated/treated", as well as the place where
"secondary cutting" takes place. It said that during dismantling,
"the canoe of the ship can act as an impermeable floor".
The EU consistently
denies that its regulation bans beaching. Dr Petros Varelidis, Greek
environmental attaché to the EU and an expert involved in the writing of the
regulation, recently told IHS Maritime that it would be counterproductive to
ban beaching. "So the regulation does not ban beaching," he said. However,
he offered no interpretation of Article 13, explaining that it is up to the
recyclers to propose ideas to the European Commission for evaluation.
Dr Nikos Mikelis,
the non-executive director of cash buyer GMS and an expert in ship breaking, is
in no doubt about what the regulation entails. "It is clear that the
[European] Commission intends to interpret the regulation as banning the
beaching of European flagged ships," he wrote in an open-source article in
November in which he also claimed that a desire to create jobs at European
breaking facilities was behind the move.
But, Mikelis
reasoned, "Europe's capacity for recycling large ships is virtually
non-existent, with few European yards focusing primarily on the recycling of
small, domestic trading and government-owned ships. Even then, most ships in
the above categories tend to be recycled in Turkey's Aliaga breaking
yards."
He further argued
that the EU is the world's second largest exporter of ferrous scrap, after the
United States. The majority of this goes to Turkey (63%). A regional
shipbreaking industry for large ships would find its ferrous scrap competing
with other European ferrous scrap, and it would all have to be transported to
countries that, mostly, already recycle ships. He called this
"nonsense" economically and environmentally as well, as most of the
parts from scrapped ships would end up in landfill compared with scrap in south
Asia, where all parts are sold and reused.
The European
regulation will be applied when the output of approved ship recycling
facilities constitutes not less than 2.5M ldt, or on 31 December 2018.
Source: his maritime
360. 01 December 2014
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