Five European ship recycling yards announced
yesterday that they have joined forces to effectively raise awareness of
existing best practice and the fact that there is capacity in Europe to
properly recycle ships. The newly established European Ship Recyclers Group
(ESR) aims at reaching out to ship owners that are looking for clean and safe
ship recycling. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform can only welcome this step and
vows to support their efforts in attracting more business as long as they
maintain sustainable practices.
The European Union approved 18 ship recycling
facilities with a total capacity of 1.1 million LDT under the EU Ship Recycling
Regulation in December last year. All 18 facilities are located within the EU
and the newly established ESR represents five of these yards – from France
(Port of Bordeaux), Belgium (Galloo), Denmark (Smedegaarden), the Netherlands
(Scheepssloperij) and Spain (DDR). The European Commission is currently
revising 18 additional applications from facilities located outside the EU. To
make it on the EU list of approved facilities, yards need to prove that they
are able to contain pollutants, ensure safe working conditions and the
environmentally sound management of all wastes derived from the recycling
activities. Facilities that operate on tidal beaches are not expected to make
it on the EU list.
Whilst ship recycling facilities in Europe,
as in the US and China, currently operate under-capacity because they are
unable to compete with the higher prices offered by the beaching yards in South
Asia, the EU list comes with a promise of raising the profile of yards that
have already invested in infrastructure and technologies to ensure safe and
clean practices.
“ESR’s main goals are to unite all European
ship recycling yards and let the ship owners know that there is capacity for
ship recycling in Europe. Our message is a clear, if we can handle them, let’s
keep the EU-flagged ships in Europe,” says Peter Wyntin of Galloo, chairman of
ESR. “ESR will be in close contact with local and EU governments to make sure
substandard and unlicensed recycling practices also within Europe are ended,”
Wyntin added.
Ship owners are regrettably quick in
rejecting European recyclers under the false pretext that there is no capacity
in Europe. European yards today primarily recycle government-owned and smaller
vessels, but questioned by the NGO Shipbreaking Platform in 2013, almost all
European yards expressed that a promise of an increased market share of the
commercially owned vessels would prompt investments to enlarge their
facilities, or use currently dormant locations, to enable the recycling of also
the largest ships.
To effectively push ship owners towards using
EU approved yards, the NGO Shipbreaking Platform is calling for an incentive
that will help close the financial gap between dirty and dangerous shipbreaking
and proper ship recycling. The shipping industry needs to internalise the
environmental and human costs of shipbreaking. The recently proposed Ship
Recycling Licence does exactly that [1] and received support from the European
Economic and Social Committee that in October adopted an opinion calling for “a
financial mechanism to end beaching”.
“Ship owners cannot continue to ignore
European recyclers and companies that have the capacity and will to provide
solutions that can put an end to the scandalous conditions we are witnessing in
South Asia. Only last week two more workers were killed at the shipbreaking
yards in Chittagong, Bangladesh – the destination where most end-of-life gross tonnage
was scrapped in 2016. [3] Commitment to use EU listed facilities is what we
expect from any shipping company that calls itself socially responsible,” said
Ingvild Jenssen, Director and Founder of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform.
Source:
hellenic
shipping news. 11 March 2017
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