GMS, leading buyer of ships for recycling, has come
out in support of statemens made by the Danish Shipowners’ Association (DSA)
which refuses to ban beaching outright following the recent announcement by
their Norwegian counterparts. GMS supports DSA’s position that ship recycling
choice shouldn’t be based just on geography.
A delegation from the DSA recently visited ship yards
in Alang, India, to see how some had upgraded their facilities to comply with
the Hong Kong Convention on ship recycling. The DSA believes it is important
that the market makes a distinction between those yards which use beaching and
comply with the Hong Kong convention and those that do not.
GMS agrees and also feels that owners who simply
decide where to recycle ships based on secondary (mis)information and
geographical location do a disservice to their stakeholders and the industry.
Often these decisions are made on perceptions rather than reality; political
pressures rather than economic facts; irrational exuberance rather than
pragmatic evaluations, said GMS in a statement. Simply throwing money does not
make ship recycling green. On the contrary, it’s likely to reward
inefficiencies and “fear mongering.”
GMS urges the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association (NSA)
to see for themselves the improvements that have been made by some of the
shipyards in Alang and is happy to extend an open invitation to members from
the NSA to visit these yards so they can make their own minds up about beaching
at specific yards just as the DSA has done.
Dr Anil Sharma founder and CEO of GMS said: “Yet again
there is a lot of misinformation in the press regarding beaching and the Hong
Kong Convention. It has been implied in certain trade press articles that the
Hong Kong Convention on ship recycling bans beaching and this is untrue.
“Many of the ship yards in Alang have made vast
improvements to comply with the Hong Kong Convention so declaring blanket bans
on beaching without viewing individual upgraded sites does nothing to encourage
other yards in the Asian sub-continent to improve their standards or persuade governments
in the region to ratify the Hong Kong Convention. It is also interesting to
note that negative stories or negative comments are generally made by people
who have either never visited the yards in India or not visited them recently.
On the other hand, those who have visited recently have made positive comments
such as the DSA and the Japanese Shipowners Association.”
Source: maritime executive. 25 August 2015
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