Deadly, dirty business

Ships have been getting “recycled” for centuries — Tudor England reused the timbers of decommissioned galleons to construct roofs in homes and pubs — but modern shipbreaking dates to the early 1950s.

And before it was offloaded onto poorer countries, it was conducted in the same countries, and often in the same ports, where ships were actually built: As late as the 1960s, there were huge ship dismantling yards across the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

In the 1970s, as those countries got wealthier, as the drive to protect their environments and the safety of their workers became objects of more and more oversight and legislation, an irony presented itself: Other countries’ environments and workers appeared increasingly attractive and expendable. Ships ceased being the responsibility of those nations that disproportionately reaped the value of the commerce they facilitated.

Instead, their owners began turning to sandy stretches of tidal beach along the Indian Ocean to discard vessels that, to disassemble in the United States or the United Kingdom or Taiwan itself, would incur extraordinary financial and environmental costs. The useful life of the ship was deemed finished; the burden of disposal and recycling was pushed downstream. As shipbreaking scholar Tony George Puthucherril has explained, the dirty work of dismantling was contradictorily presented as an opportunity to clean up the shipping industry’s dismal environmental footprint.

Only by the early 1980s, old ships weren’t deemed “ships” at all, nor would shipping companies, determined though they were to dispose of them, countenance calling them “waste.”

They were hunks of steel, measured and sold by the ton and repackaged as “raw material” for the subcontinent. Disposal, once expensive for the shipping industry, now offered one additional windfall of profit. By the 1990s, hundreds of the world’s ships were directed every year toward South Asia for dismemberment. By 2007, at which time four out of every five ships undergoing destruction anywhere in the world were being wrenched to pieces along the shorelines of the subcontinent, the environmental toll had turned cataclysmic and irreversible.

Just take India. Today, the waters surrounding the shipbreaking facilities at Alang are inhabited almost exclusively by species of fish “tolerant to petroleum hydrocarbons,” or so local marine biologists have determined. Moving inland, hundreds of local wells have been abandoned owing to the poisoning of the regional water table. “This is a place that has seceded from India at every environmental and legal level,” Gopal Krishna, an environmentalist who has spent decades measuring toxicity levels at Alang, told me. “It has been colonised by the global shipping industry and their protectors in the United Nations. And it is run by a local mafia elite that are the de facto lawmakers and lawbreakers.”

In addition to the Hong Kong Convention, shipping companies have honed a range of tools for evading responsibility for what ultimately happens to their vessels. When a shipping company decides to sell its cargo container or tanker to the subcontinent, it often arranges that sale through a crop of middlemen — typically Dutch or British, sometimes based out of Singapore or Dubai — who broker deals in cash and proceed to deal with Bangladeshi and Indian and Pakistani conglomerates directly. For the shipping multinationals, the aim is to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the calamity of dismantling.

As the ships are passed off to these cash buyers, they are promptly “re-flagged,” taking up the nationalities of even more recondite island states — so called black flag nations like St Kitts and Nevis, Comoros, and Palau — which offer brokers, in addition to the usual hodgepodge of legal benefits, zero pretense of environmental oversight.

The Republic of Palau, an impoverished archipelago of 340 coral and volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that earns approximately $10,000 in exchange for handing its flag out to cash buyers, has little incentive and less ability — or, as the shipbreaking expert Nicola Mulinaris put it to me, possesses “lack of knowledge, lack of resources, lack of will” — to hold a shipping company licensed in Valletta, or a shipbreaking yard based in Bangladesh, responsible for any calamities inflicted on the endangered mangroves of Chittagong.

Finally, vessels tend to be sold while anchored in international waters presided over by no single nation, making it more difficult for authorities to take account of, among other things, any hazardous materials on board.

Which is all to say that by the time a ship is getting hacked to pieces by thousands of South Asian migrants, it has an exorcised relationship with the Western shipping company that it just spent the last years, possibly even decades, enriching. What the shipping industry has accomplished amounts to a supercharged version of how Coca-Cola justifies its sales in the plastic-infested metropolises of Africa: assuring you that though they have profited off it, the devastation is not their problem.

“Globalisation has helped fuel this rush to the bottom,” the world’s largest seafarers’ union has claimed about the failures to hold the shipbreaking industry accountable for its environmental and labour-rights depravations.

And, true enough, to bring a semblance of responsibility to the shipbreaking industry would first require something exponentially more difficult: bringing a modicum of accountability to the international shipping industry itself.

Excerpted from Waste Wars by Alexander Clapp, with permission from the publishers, John Murray Press/ Hachette India.