Nations to sign treaty on shipbreaking

HONG KONG–Dozens of nations were to sign a new treaty Friday to make ship recycling safer, but activists call it a step backwards for the environment and the labourers who carry out the dangerous work.

The UN’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is establishing a first-ever convention on shipbreaking, which often exposes workers to asbestos, mercury and other hazardous substances.

The deal would require shipowners to provide an inventory of hazardous materials aboard a ship before it is sent for recycling — work that is mostly carried out in China, Turkey and south Asia, often by unskilled migrants.

But activists say it fails to end the controversial practice of “beaching,” when ships are dumped at high tide and then drift to beaches to be taken apart — a practice that many environmental groups say must be banned.

“(The) convention as it now stands is a legal shipwreck waiting to happen,” said Ingvild Jenssen of NGO Platform on Shipbreaking, an umbrella group of non-governmental organizations.

“It will not prevent a single ship being exported and dumped on the beaches of India, Bangladesh or Pakistan,” she said.

Much of the shipbreaking done in developing countries takes place on soft sand beaches, where access for heavy lifting equipment and emergency vehicles is difficult or impossible, raising health and safety concerns.

But the IMO defended the proposed agreement without a ban on beaching, saying the 66 member states represented at the Hong Kong conference had to deal with reality in an important multi-million dollar industry.

“There is nothing that can force a sovereign state to become party to an international convention should it consider it not in its interests to do so,” IMO spokesman Lee Adamson said.

He called the treaty “a tremendous step forward in terms of health and safety for workers in the industry and for protection of the environment from end-of-life ships — it will set standards where none previously existed.”

The IMO estimates that between 1990 and 2006, more than 10,000 ships that weighed over 500 gross tons were recycled worldwide.

Breakers pay ship owners by the ton and make their money from re-selling the recovered materials. According to the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking, 80 percent of recycling is done by ill-protected workers on beaches in poor nations.

Yards in less well-regulated parts of the world can pay much more to break up the ships, as they pay lower wages and have less rigorous health and safety laws.

“(A ship owner will get) more than 10 times the price by selling to a yard in Bangladesh than to a yard in the European Union,” where regulations are much stricter, said Jenssen.

Presently, ship owners can expect to earn around $300 per ton by selling to a south Asian shipbreaker, she said, down from around $700 as prices for raw materials have tumbled because of the global economic slowdown.

As well as the danger to workers from hazardous waste such as asbestos and old fuels, beaches provide a poor environment to contain these pollutants, said NGO Platform spokeswoman Helen Pervier.

“No developed country at this meeting would allow a ship to be broken up on its beaches,” she said.

The convention represented a missed opportunity, said Eelco Leemans of lobby group North Sea Foundation, which is affiliated to Friends of the Earth.

“What I hoped for was that one of the European countries would say beaching should be phased out and we should consider a timeline for that phase-out,” he said. “What surprised me was the silence by European states.” – Huw Griffith, Agence France-Presse INQUIRER.NET