Newsroom Blog
Urgent solution needed
By Lloyds List Comment
Wednesday 4 November 2009
SHIPBREAKING on beaches is nasty and brutish, shortening some of the lives of workers who toil at shipbreaking for a living. It also, by reliable accounts, adds seriously to environmental pollution, as toxic chemicals are washed out to sea.
Therefore it came as a surprise that a former Bangladeshi official defended the practice at a London conference last week.
The defence by AKM Shafiqullah, former director general of Bangladesh’s Department of Shipping, opined that environmental damage due to ship recycling in Bangladesh is greatly overblown.
He admitted that the practice had led to polluted soil along the coastline, but insisted that damage of the sea environment was minimal. The ships, he said, were typically beached at the highest tide of the month and were therefore further inland. That meant that the amount of exposure that hulls had to tidal water, which would sweep the toxic waste out to sea, was limited.
The argument met with incredulous comments by others on a panel, and eventually Capt Shafiqullah admitted that the beaches were flooded twice a day. Still, he insisted the ships were only exposed part of the time.
This has been an eventful several months in the shipbreaking debate. Ingvild Jenssen of the Brussels-based Platform on Shipbreaking, a coalition of lobby groups, accurately said: “The last few weeks have been terrible in Chittagong,” responding to seven recent deaths on Bangladesh beaches.
Shipbreaking has been on the agenda of European Union environmental ministers’ for some time. Now Brussels’ lawmakers are pushing for new legislation to improve conditions in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, EU members are split on the idea of a scrapping fund, which would be financed by a levy on all ships calling on EU ports. The fund would be designed to speed up transfer of new scrapping technology.
The International Maritime Organization agreed a new Convention on Ship Recycling in May, but critics say the convention will take too long to enact and did not go far enough. The IMO did shy away from condemning beach shipbreaking altogether, in its effort to be as inclusive as possible in its constituency that must take into account the interest and concerns of both poor and rich nations.
Capt Shafiqullah’s ill-considered comments only give urgency to those who would rather rush to a solution outside of the IMO.
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