From earliest times, when a ship’s life was over she was recycled to recover anything that could be reused. Wooden hulls were stripped and often burned to salvage the last of the metal fittings.
At present, hundreds of ships are scrapped each year. In 2012, more than 1,000 of them made their final voyages to shipbreaking facilities that are mostly located in Asia. With ships’ average service life of 20–30 years, there will always be a generous supply of hulls for this industry.
The major countries offering shipbreaking services are, in order of volume, Bangladesh, India, China, Pakistan, and Turkey. These five nations account for 85 percent of the global maritime industry’s ship recycling. Though China is a relatively new entrant into this business, its need for cheap scrap steel drives this development.
The prevailing shipbreaking technique is to run the vessels hard aground at the highest possible speed to get them as close as can be to where demolition is to take place. The best sites are where there is a very shallow beach gradient and a high tidal range.
Swarms of workers then strip the ships of all possible equipment, fittings, and fluids. More than a million workers are employed at the South Asian sites, which did over $6 billion worth of business in 2012. At the same time, unsafe working conditions resulted in the deaths of 40 workers and injuries to hundreds more.
The labor-intensive approach can recycle virtually 90 percent of a ship. From porthole fittings to large generator sets, everything useful is offered for sale. At many sites you will find large “bazaars” just outside the gates, where buyers can shop for reusable stuff.
The top five countries’ shipbreakers are not high-tech, efficient operations. It is a combination of abundant cheap labor and very poor worker safety that creates the business advantage. In addition, the removal and disposal of toxic materials such as asbestos and PCBs is mostly very casual.
South Asian ship recyclers can actually outbid others in buying retired ships even though those yards may pay more for them. Their low operating costs make the difference. For example, they can make money paying $400 per ton per ship while outside competitors could only offer no more than $375 per ton. One company in Bangladesh, where the lowest costs and most unsafe operations are located, was reported to be making a 20 percent profit on its operations.
To be sure, almost all the operations in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan are profoundly dirty and unsafe. Recently, there have been some very modest token efforts by those nations to improve conditions. More important, there is increasing international concern that developed nations are simply exporting their “dirt” to the Third World in the name of maximizing profit.
As a result, the European community and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are working on standards and regulations for ship disposals. This will help, but the rules could be outmaneuvered if the ships are flagged in nations where such regulations may not apply, for example, flag-of-convenience states such as Panama, the Bahamas, Liberia, etc.
It is legal for privately owned U.S. vessels to be recycled abroad. In the case of government-owned ships (the Navy and the Maritime Administration), they must by law be disposed of in the United States. There are only a handful of domestic ship-recycling companies, most of them located near Brownsville, Texas. Understandably, operational costs at these sites far surpass those of South Asia. But they are safe and environmentally clean. In many cases, the federal government has to pay to have warships recycled. For example, the 62,000-ton aircraft carrier Constellation is now being scrapped at Brownsville, and the shipbreaker is being paid $3 million for the job. Much of this expense is due to the lengthy tow of the vessel from Bremerton, Washington, to the Gulf of Mexico. Other government-owned ships have been sold to the breakers for a nominal contractual amount of a few cents. By no means is this recycling a paying concern for the U.S. government.
Disposal of U.S. Navy nuclear-powered vessels is in a very special category. There are five naval-shipyard/ship-repair locations qualified to remove the fuel and equipment; then removal of the reactors and scrapping of the hulls is done at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton. The cost for scrapping a nuclear submarine can be in the range of $25–50 million.
Ship recycling is a necessary business, and recycling is a good thing. But today it is not “green.” To ensure that it is done safely and cleanly will require concerted international regulation. The global maritime-industry companies must play by the same rules. It can be done, but many loopholes need to be closed.