Green Ships:Green Ship Countries

India

Specific Harms

Alang, India: (Occupational) Shipbreakers exposed to substances like asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls, residual oil, and situations such as explosions and falling steel. (Puthucherril) There is no systematic training for the workforce, and injuries and fatalities are common.' Accidents where 15 men die at once are unfortunately common. (Dodds) Most shipwrecking workers in SW Asia live in shanties made of recycled ship steel. Housing and sanitary conditions worsened by transient nature. (Dodds) Popular because located close to major trade routes, offer minimum transport distances, low-cost for labor-intensive work, insufficient or nonenforced legislative frameworks, ready made market for old ship components (pumps, generators, compressors, motors) refurbished and applied in emerging industrialized economies, conveniently large inter-tidal zones where high tides allow vessel to be beached under its own power. (Dodds) India worldleader in shipwrecking by volume, State of Gujarat along beaches of Alang. (Dodds) Reports from Alang beach indicate shipwrecking facilities heavily contaminated with heavy metals, asbestos, and TBT. (Dodds)

Bangladesh

Specific Harms

Since 1974, Bangladesh has had approximately 50 shipbreaking yards that have dismantled about 52 per cent of the end-of-life vessels above 200 dead weight tonnage in the world. (Alam) These yards supply 25–30 per cent of the country's total yearly demand for steel. (Alam) As of 2012, Bangladesh demolished one and a half million tons of steel, more than the country currently has the ability to buy on the international market. (Alam) Bangladesh (Environmental): Despite the elusive size of the industry and its grave effects, there is no specific legal regulatory framework in Bangladesh to monitor this ongoing environmental damage. (Alam) Annexes I, II, IV and V to the MARPOL (Marine Pollution) Convention require the establishment of appropriate waste-reception facilities for the reception of ship-generated waste. (Alam) However, Bangladesh has not ratified the relevant annexes of the MARPOL Convention. (Alam) EU Waste Shipment Regulation: Since the EU is a major exporter of end-of-life ships to substandard “dismantling and recycling” facilities in South Asia, the European legislation concerning this topic is of crucial importance. (Alam)

BANGLADESH (Occupational): According to Greenpeace, the IMO Guidelines are not adequate to protect workers or the environment partly because they do not contain effective mechanisms to monitor or ensure compliance nor do they provide adequate guidance for companies, courts and governments on how they should deal with the export of ships for scrapping in a manner, which is fully consistent with other existing international commitments. (Alam) The ILO (International Labor Guidelines) Guidelines for Asian Countries and Turkey, 2004, identi- fied a list of common hazards in shipbreaking activities that are likely to cause injuries, death, ill health, diseases and incidents among the workers. (Alam) In the ship breaking area of Chittagong 10.94% labour are child (Photo: Reichmann, 2005) (Hossain) In the ship breaking yards a huge number of labour (46.42%) are illiterate and 43.02% labours are educated up to primary level. The huge uneducated labour force has less scope for better professional jobs within and outside the sector. Less accessibility to different opportunities including information for exercising rights, as they have almost no education and information (YPSA, 2005). (Hossain) Woman filters asbestos into powder in workshop outside the shipbreaking yards, Bangladesh (FIDH, 2005) (Hossain)