Ship Recycling: New Agreement Seeks End to Labor and Environmental Hazards

Old soldiers may “just fade away,” as General Douglas MacArthur so famously declared in his farewell speech to Congress, but old ships don’t retire quite so easily. When ships reach the end of their useful life, all too often they are run aground in some poor country—India and Bangladesh are two popular favorites—to be cut apart and dismantled so that their steel and other materials can be sold for scrap and recycled.

Beaching the vessels avoids expensive dry dock costs, but it also increases the risks for workers, many of whom are killed or maimed each year due to unsafe working conditions. The environmental also takes a hit from unregulated ship recycling, which contaminates shorelines with oil, asbestos, toxic paint, and other dangerous substances.

In Hong Kong earlier this week, after more than five years of negotiations, delegates from 64 countries finally forged an international agreement for the regulation of ship recycling. The International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships requires that:

• Ships must carry detailed and up-to-date inventories of hazardous materials they have used or transported throughout their years of service, and provide that information to recycling facilities;
• Recycling centers must have disposal procedures for hazardous materials;
• Centers also are required to prepare emergency response plans;
• Workers at ship recycling centers must be equipped with protective gear to help reduce injuries.

The new agreement isn’t perfect. It doesn’t require hazardous materials to be removed by specially trained workers following established safety procedures before a ship can be dismantled, for example, and it doesn’t end the practice of dismantling ships on beaches in poor countries where docks are expensive, labor is cheap, and ship recycling is a labor-intensive industry that provides many much-needed jobs. But the biggest weakness of the new pact is the lack of any kind of international regulatory agency to enforce the agreement. Enforcement is left entirely in the hands of individual governments.

Many of the delegates acknowledged some of the agreement’s flaws or shortcomings, but as Anna Petersson, head of the environment section of Swedens’ Maritime Administration told The New York Times: “We are trying to stipulate certain high standard levels. You have to start somewhere.”