Shipbreaking: A Global Environmental, Health and Labour Challenge A Greenpeace Report for IMO MEPC 44 th Session (original) (raw)
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Ishtiaque Ahmed, 2020
Environmental protection and economic development are closely intertwined. The global treaty on ship breaking has been a cause of intense debate over the rights of economic development, environmental protection and the allocation of responsibility for environmental harm arising from shipbreaking between ship owning and ship recycling nations. These countries traditionally happen to be the developed and the developing countries respectively. In this global treaty, the concerns of the key ship recycling nations, namely their economic priority and desperate need for alleviation of poverty, have been overlooked. This has resulted in the progression of negative externality in the domestic jurisdictions of all key ship recycling nations. If the race to the bottom and divergence created by this negative externality between private and social costs is not corrected by legal measures, and polluters are allowed to continue to operate until reaching the maximum point of their private benefit, this may bring no aggregate benefit to society, but will result in an obvious environmental and social disaster leading to a threat to the sustainability of the industry. In this capitalist society, the law as it exists would hardly influence the tug of war between groups representing the powerful industry on one hand and inanimate objects such as ecology and the toiling masses on the other. The HKC was adopted back in 2009 as a response to the global call after three decades of mobocracy and lawlessness in the shipbreaking industry. If the demand of greater equity in this global pact is not met as suggested in this article, sustainability of this global industry in the near term may remain far from the reality.
Trade Law and Development, 2010
The increasing dominance of developing countries like India, China, Bangladesh and Pakistan in the global ship-breaking industry illustrates the paradoxical nature of economic globalization. While such operations provide access to employment and cheap material resources, they also pose serious long-term and irreversible harm to local environment and human health. In addition, the transnational character of the shipbreaking trade has militated against effective domestic oversight of its environmental hazards and has turned international regulation into an imperative.
Fordham Environmental Law Review, 2020
Ship-breaking is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world and widely known as a pollution-heavy industry. This industry is currently concentrated primarily in three South Asian developing countries, namely Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Ensuring the safe and environmentally sound recycling of ships remains a global concern. There are many international regulations which apply to the activities of ship-breaking, but none of them address the issue in a comprehensive manner. The most relevant international instrument governing ship recycling, the 2009 Hong Kong Convention remains unenforceable due to non-ratification by the chief ship recycling states. The only enforceable international instrument closely relevant to ship recycling activity is the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal adopted in 1989. However due to its exceedingly pro-environmental character, its applicability over End of Life ships remains uncertain. As a stopgap measure, this article will attempt to explore other currently enforceable international laws that can potentially be utilized to govern the industry in the face of uncertainty with these two mainstream legal instruments. This article postulates that a prompt solution to this controversial global activity is unlikely to occur anytime soon.
The Ship Breaking and Recycling Industry in Bangladesh and Pakistan
2010
This study seeks to strengthen the knowledge base with respect to competitiveness and profitability of the Ship Breaking and Recycling Industry (SBRI) and to investigate the feasibility of ship breaking countries in this region, specifically Bangladesh and Pakistan, achieving compliance with the Hong Kong Convention (HKC) without jeopardizing the future of the industry there. The objective of the study is to inform key stakeholders associated with policy making and ship breaking including the government of Pakistan and the government of Bangladesh about the current problems encountered in the SBRI and suggest a road map to help strengthen institutional and regulatory systems that can improve work practices in the ship breaking and recycling industry. The study addresses the following: i) it assessed the productivity, competitiveness and growth potential of the industry in Bangladesh and Pakistan (chapter two); ii) it undertook environmental audits of hazardous waste materials presen...
'One Ship, One Death': The Environmental and Ethical Implications of the Ship Recycling Industry
Social and Political Research Foundation, 2020
The next few years are predicted to see a boom in the ship recycling industry, for reasons that include the financial slowdown at the global level, and the passing of the Recycling of Ships Act, 2019 and ratification of the Hong Kong Convention at the domestic level. This paper, the second in the two-part series on ship recycling, engages with the implications of this boom, both on the lives of workers and the environment. It additionally contextualises the politics of waste – specifically, the global waste trade, and highlights the possibility of a refocus from ship recycling to ship building in the country.