More than 60,000 large ships crawl through the world's oceans, many with a deck size of several football fields, carrying many thousands of tons of cargo. These include:

Oil tankers

Container ships, which have large containers transporting a range of products like medicines, food items, machinery parts, powder chemicals, household appliances and computers,

Bulk carriers, which transport ore, grains, cattle, phosphates, coal, soybeans and China clay Chemical tankers, which carry all kinds of substances in liquid form, like phenol, molasses and edible oils.

General cargo ships which move a variety of things, from food products like cocoa and coffee beans and rice in big bags, to large machine parts.

Add to this list large deep sea trawlers with onboard fish processing units and cold storage facilities

Add whaling ships

And luxury passenger liners

Then add dredgers, fire fighting and patrol vessels, tug boats, and vehicle carriers.

The shipping industry is the backbone of international trade. It is also the source of major environmental toxins poisoning people and the planet.

Oil spills killing off seabirds and ocean creatures are well known tragedies, publicised through live and dramatic television footage. Less known but equally if not more deadly are the graveyards where ships end their lives.

A ship's life lasts for an average of 25 to 30 years after which they are no longer considered safe to sail. 95% of these huge ships are made of valuable steel, which makes dismantling them to recover it, a lucrative prospect. Scrapping a ship can make the owner a profit of about 1.9 million US dollars! But these ships, especially the ones built before the 80's, also have tons of extremely toxic substances, hazardous to human and environmental health.


Where Ships Go to Die

In the 1970's ship breaking was done in the docks Europe. It was a highly mechanised industrial operation. But as European countries grew more conscious of environmental standards, and health and safety measures, costs of scrapping began to escalate. So where could ship owners go so that their profit margins would not be eroded?

About 90% of the ship breaking industry predictably moved to Asian countries, to India, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan and Turkey, poorer nations with lax environmental and safety standards. Every year 600-700 sea vessels are brought to the once pristine beaches of Asia for scrapping. In India most of the ships are beached at Alang, in Gujarat, on the West Coast of India. After the beaching of the MV Kota Tenjong in 1983, this once beautiful beach has become the world's leading shipbreaking yard.

Beaches where ship breaking happens in Asia, are now graveyards littered with machinery parts, oil rags and leaking barrels, the air poisoned by open fires, the land and surrounding water contaminated by asbestos, heavy metals, dioxins and other persistent organic pollutants. In Alang, you can see women carrying asbestos waste on their heads and dumping it in the sea

Health and Safety standards

On the beaches of Alang in India, and Chittagong in Bangladesh, and in other Asian ship breaking yards, you can see workers with bare hands using acetylene torch cutters to dismantle huge sea carriers into small pieces. They don't have gloves, they're unprotected from toxic substances, explosions and falling steel. Untrained and desperately poor, they are willing to work without the gas masks and safety equipment mandatory in first world countries, for a pittance of 60 to 100 rupees a day.

Endless Greed

As some countries wise up to the problems of ship breaking and bring in legislation, ship owners merely move operations to even poorer countries. Residual gas in the tanks of dead ships, pose a huge risk of explosion to workers. In 2000, an explosion in a gas tanker killed 20-40 workers in Bangladesh. Bangladesh does not enforce mandatory "gas- free for hot works" certifications which ensure that the ships are free of gas residues before they're scrapped. India does. So oil tankers moved out of Indian yards. Ship owners get between 115 to 200 US dollars per ton of ship while scrapping. Degassing costs them only 2 US dollars per ton. The numbers speak for themselves!

An Escalating Disaster

Environmentally catastrophic collapses of oil tankers has caused the International Maritime Organistion to recommend a phase out of certain kinds of high risk ships called single hull oil tankers. The EU then agreed to an accelerated phase-out schedule. This means that - starting 2003 - roughly 2,200 such ships will have to be taken out of service. The other reason for the growth of the scrap market is the increase of the world fleet during the last decades. In 1960 there were around 15,000 ships with a combined dead weight tonnage of 84 million. In 2000 there were 4 times the number of ships and their combined dead weight tonnage had increased nearly ten fold! More ships in use, means more ships to be eventually scrapped. This means a greater danger to people and the planet, if some big changes don't happen soon.