SHIP’S GRAVEYARD: ALANG, INDIA
Battered by the pandemic (haven’t we all been?), cruise ship industry owners with no immediate passengers have filed for bankruptcy, while others reduced operating costs by retiring ships early.
More than two dozen vessels have been scrapped since and whilst some companies have recycled in an environmentally responsible way, others have not, allowing their ships to be broken up in India enabling high profits, but ignoring dangerous working conditions and environmental risks.
Three cruise liners, the Marco Polo, Magellan and Columbus sailed from the UK last year to Alang, India to be broken up mainly for their steel, although little was said that all three vessels contained asbestos, chemicals and other toxic materials.What follows is that their export to India should never have been allowed.
For under the 1999 Basel Convention, the movement of hazardous of waste between nations to less developed countries is now banned; in fact, under this legislation a whole ship is now classed as toxic waste (1) – in everyday language it’s time for wealthy companies to clean up the mess they leave behind.
Toxic waste is quite a shameful categorisation for a ship to be labelled with, but nonetheless, the Marco Polo was allowed to leave UK waters on strict condition she would be used as a ship.However, as most seafarers will attest the world of shipping is indeed dodgy – it is no coincidence that flag of convenience (FOC) states are often financial centres and off-shore tax havens – think brass-plaque offices in the Cayman Islands, Isle of Man and Liberia, for example. And with subsidiaries and holding companies thousands of miles away in Singapore and Panama – effectively it’s hard to track just who is doing business with whom.
As offshoreis oftena word associated with secretive practices, enter the offshore company HighSeas Ltd, an Indian-based company described as ‘being integrated from shipbuilding to offshore.’ (2)Interestingly, the company does have an Isle of Man office – but any anonymity which HighSeas may benefit from wasn’t an issue with the Marco Polo sale.
For the ship was transparently bought at auction by offshore company HighSeas Ltd with the assurance that it would either be used as a cruise ship or a floating hotel in Dubai according to director Mr Rishi Aggarwal.(3)But when HighSeas Ltd announced that the deal for Dubai was cancelled, the company together with it’s other offshore concerns, instructed the ship to sail for Alang ship breakers.
Only a legal case could determine fraudulent dealings, despite rumours that the Dubai proposal was just a set-up to circumvent environmental rules.So the Marco Polo was finally scrapped in due course followed by the Magellan and Columbus; the Magellan, incidentally, had secured work on Liverpool’s waterfront of all places – ostensibly as a floating hotel for the 2021 Grand National (3) only to eventually lose this business arrangement as she too was run up to the Alang beach wreckers.
The Columbus sailed to Alang but not before it changed its name to to Colus – quite easy to do, for once lawyers have attended to small details, the next job is a very practical task.For example, just wield an angle-grinder and paint brush then, voila, the ship becomes the Colus and dodges the Basel Convention’s rules – it’s that easy.
Nonetheless, shipowners aren’t always off-loading ships with full impunity for as the non-government organisation (NGO) Shipbreaking Platform states: ‘The UK authorities should investigate these cases and prove if there was an intention to scrap the vessels when they left the UK’. (4)Meanwhile, Shipbreaking Platform, an erstwhile global coalition of NGO’s working to reverse environment harm and improve working conditions in places like India strives to keep shipowners and breakers within the law.
Shipbreaking Platform has been also instrumental in advancing the Hong Kong Convention 2009 (HKC) which accords with the NGO’s aims.The government of India did sign up but limited success of the HKC was laid bare by the fact there were only five signatories to this legal document – hardly significant when one considers there are scores of maritime nation-states.Meanwhile in Alang, ships are cut to pieces 24/7 for their steel and any other marketable commodity, the night-sky bluish from hundreds of oxy-acetylene torches.
The business isn’t just shipbreaking there, but ship construction too generates income with the salvage providing a large percentage of local ship construction needs for a minimal transport cost.Perhaps this in itself is environmentally commendable until we learn that other waste such as asbestos, which is not classed as a hazardous material in India, is freely traded as a building material.Neither has India’s 1981 Clean Air Act been regularly enforced, the poisonous particulates from yard bonfires falling upon nearby neighbourhoods.And contaminated diesel, fuel oil residue, bio-medical waste, ozone depleting substances, PCB’s, plus plastics have often been discarded on the beach to disappear with the tide.
That notwithstanding, what is trash in the West is usually marketable in India, and beyond the industrial area there is an extensive street market selling anything which is salvaged from ships.Some items are from warehouses selling a spanner to a complete diesel generator, a ship’s lifeboat, a mooring winch or an oil-fired boiler.Want to buy an engine con rod or cylinder liner weighing several tonnes?They’re all here whilst smaller stalls sell tea sets, cutlery, furniture, stainless steel galley equipment, power tools, centrifugal pumps, electrical components, etc, with a constant line of overseas enquiries for nautical bric-a-brac, ship’s wheels, lifebuoys, etc.
It is plain that with such large items the floor area of such a street market has got to be big.It is very big – in fact the street market stretches for five miles and although ship parts would hardly be a glitzy attraction to shoppers in the developed world’s mall culture, Alang’s stalls and warehouses prompt analysts to report that in its own right, it is a retail wonder expanding local trade and employment.
On the other hand, albeit the usefulness of upcycling parts is to be praised, a blatant disregard of safe working conditions has been a major criticism.Specifically, how did these items get to market and how?Well, most sources confirm that, in a workplace of barefooted and bareheaded employees swarming over ships like ants – often precariously on bamboo scaffolding and rope ladders – there have been hundreds of otherwise preventable fatalities caused by falls, fires and explosions, not to mention the disabling accidents of shattered limbs and illnesses from industrial dust and gases.And hospitals, it was disclosed, were a distant 60 kms from Alang.
Use of child labour in the yards was widely reported – children, of course being the ideal size to enter a ship’s tight spaces with oxy-acetylene torches.In some cases the length of this cutting gear wouldn’t be much smaller than the child operating it.Personal protective equipment (PPE) has been rarely issued, usually only at times of visits by government officials and the even rarer visits by the press.Workers complained of being cheated of their wages and denied even basic training with little recourse to access for worker compensation claims – no slick Lawyers4U-type ads on television here.
Even so, the lure of amassing money which seems to driving Alang to ignore environmental rules and workers’ rights is coming back to haunt them.For the Danish Maersk Corporation – the world’s largest shipowner (1,365 vessels) – and scrapping ships as fast as it builds them cancelled three contracts there proving that in liberal economics money can incentivise business to follow the rules and be a force for good.The Danish environmental culture is strong, as is legislation in the workplace and when scrapping the Maersk Georgia and Maersk Wyoming, Maerskinsisted upon strict waste disposal procedures and adherence to workers’ safety from Alang.
Maersk monitored the dismantling of both ships throughout with full issue of PPE, toolbox talks, work permits, etc, with the result that the only accidents involved with these ships were a twisted ankle and a minor gas leak.To its credit, it is the aforementioned Indian government being signatory to the HKC which has changed business positively, Maersk of course, being a lesser player.
For example, with government monitoring, over half of the hundred-plus yards in Alang report improvements according to the definitions of HKC; but why others escape such monitoring is another question.Still, employment of children has now been banned in HKC-affiliated yards, according to an Indian government statement.Reports suggest that pay for all workers has increased to 730 rupees per day, up from 340 rupees p.d. In 2016 (£1=100 rupees), with even an insurance scheme involving Indian trade unions.Furthermore, safer working conditions including working-at-height, safe entry, confined space work, etc, are now part of standard operating procedure (SOP); the few journalists who previously gained access to the yard reported that safe entry access, ie, ensuring that a space is gas-free was usually facilitated not by an electronic meter to register 21% oxygen, but by lowering a basket of chickens into the tank – if after 15 minutes the chickens were returned alive, the tank was unscientifically declared safe to work.
Just one of many bad practices but which hadn’t escaped world media – the press by the way was strongly dissuaded from visiting any of the yards by the presence of company security.The press hasn’t been silent though for documentaries such as Shipbreakers (2009) from the National Film Board of Canada, exposing further inequalities have prompted other releases such as Iron Eaters, a film/documentary from Bangladesh outlying similar problems.So openness has improved and another actor has been the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), an organisation which provides grants and technical assistance for underdeveloped countries from Japan’s government.Following tours of the yards with subsequent environmental impact assessment (EIA) submissions, JICA contributed $76 mn to be used in developing ‘green’ disposal of wastes – the previous ‘dirty’ waste disposal was held to be responsible for many deaths in the yards.
So it seems that Alang is, by and large, advancing beyond the laissez faire management of previous years. In fairness, India’s government defends itself in stating that it doesn’t have access to the capital and resources of the West – that indeed, rich countries themselves went through a period of development before workers’ conditions improved.And of course, they’re right – child labour once cleaned soot from chimneys and picked cotton waste from Lancashire mill machinery; whilst the polluted land, rivers and coastal waters of industrialising countries were seen as having no intrinsic value, something that nations in Western Europe and North America should remember with shame.
But let’s return to the ships Marco Polo, Magellan, and Columbus (aka Colus).Following on their wintertime departure from the UK under a changing itinerary, communiques in report form from Alang have been sparse.Did these ships beach at the HKC-affiliated yards of Alang (there are scores of them), or did they end up at the ones which purposely ignore the Convention?Because central to this controversy as the BBC point out is proof of intent.
Was there intention to sell them for scrap or not? For it might be whichever businesses were involved that conscience is making cowards of them all.
REFERENCES:
1). http://www.basel.int (2009) – accessed 30.08.2021
2) Business Today.ind (09.08.09) – accessed 01.09.2021
3) www,bbc.news.co.uk (21.03.2021): UK cruise ships scrapped in India – accessed 30.08.2021
4) http://www.shipbreakingplatform.org>the problem>India (05.04.2022) – accessed 30.08.2021