In March 1998 the 43,000-ton Oak Wave slid down a dry dock in Japan. Over the next 25 years, the $30m bulk carrier — designed to haul grain and other commodities — called at ports across Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, ran through five owners and three names, and changed its flag twice. Then, last November, just after being sold for $5.
9m, the Catherine Bright (as it was re-christened in 2018) set sail from Qatar for a destination it had never before visited: Gadani, Pakistan. The town of about 10,000 is more ship graveyard than port, just a cluttered 10km stretch of oil-sodden beach. It’s one of three South Asian shipbreaking yards, where dozens of small companies dismantle almost three-quarters of the vessels — hundreds of container ships, oil tankers, vehicle carriers, tugs, cruise liners, and even oil and gas platforms — that are broken apart globally each year.
All three yards feature relatively deep water right up to the beach, allowing operators to run enormous ships aground — no dock required. Ships contain lead, mercury, heavy oil, carcinogens such as cadmium and asbestos, and sometimes radioactive material. As workers brandishing gas torches shear off giant plates of steel, the vessels often leak oil and other toxins into the sea.
Heavy metals spill on to the sand — their concentration at Alang is 20 times the Indian average. Tides and currents carry these poisons into delicate wildlife habitats and pollute local fisheries. A 2018 report by the United Nations Human Rights Council called it “another egregious example of an industry that continues to externalise impacts on poor workers and communities in developing countries”.
A new international agreement governing ship recycling yards, known as the Hong Kong Convention, is scheduled to come into force next June. Under the treaty, countries must certify that their facilities follow procedures to prevent hazards — such as explosions, fires, and falling sheets of metal — with stringent guidelines for reporting any incidents. They’ll be required to maintain an inventory of any toxic materials contained in a ship — right down to the lead paint and fluorescent bulbs — and guarantee environmentally sound disposal.
So far, 15 countries — representing 40% of gross shipping tonnage worldwide — have signed on. India joined in 2019, and Pakistan and Bangladesh followed last year. The Hong Kong rules will put recycling “much higher up on the international agenda than it has been for a long time,” says William Mac- Lachlan, a partner at HFW, a London law firm that advises shipowners.
Gadani lies on the arid, rocky coast 45km north-west of Karachi, Pakistan’s hyperkinetic port city of 20m. Just outside Gadani’s centre, dozens of companies each control 100m-250m of sandy beachfront. Here, as many as 12,000 workers clamber over the carcasses of rusting ships.
As a ship approaches the shore, contractors at the yards start rounding up workers. “Cheers go up when they get the call,” says Gul Nawab, a 60-year-old veteran of the yards. After receiving clearance to land, skippers simply ram their ships into the shore at high tide and drop anchor.
Once the vessel is secured with chains and cables, workers rush in with drills, cranes, and welding equipment, and immediately begin cutting it apart. They start from the bow and proceed sternward. As a vessel is stripped, workers will leverage the tides to pull what’s left further up the beach with tractors and bulldozers.
A 100,000-ton vessel — typical of what the yard handles, but less than half the size of the biggest ships — can require two months, and perhaps 300 people, to dismantle it piece by piece. On a recent sultry morning, a dozen vessels are in various stages of dismemberment, with drillers, crane operators, welders, and others tackling tasks from cutting to cleaning. Sheets of steel, piles of enormous chains, empty gas cylinders, and rusted pipes are loaded on to trucks bound for scrapyards in Karachi.
Air conditioners, refrigerators, and kitchen equipment pulled from the ship are stacked in a shelter, awaiting sale. By the time the process is over, what’s left will be little more than a smear of oil — which will soon be swallowed by the tide. “Not a single bolt goes to waste,” says Fazal Subhan, a manager at Plot 122, where about 100 people are disassembling a 9,000-ton vessel.
Everything gets extracted and sorted — steel, iron, copper, rubber, you name it. Even the engines, generators, appliances, and furniture. The International Labour Organization calls shipbreaking “one of the world’s most dangerous jobs”.
Human Rights Watch says many companies take “shortcuts on occupational and safety measures”, and compensation for those injured on the job is often below the levels mandated by local laws. Workers report a critical lack of basic safety measures, and recount harrowing experiences of lost limbs or wounds from exploding metal. “God will hold the bosses accountable on the day of judgement,” says Jamal Baksh, 55, who lost four members of his extended family in blaze at Gadani in 2016.
Mr Subhan says that Plot 122 now requires workers to wear helmets, gloves, and heavy boots, and that Pakistan’s ratification of the new global standards has increased attention to safety. “We’re working hard to meet the Hong Kong Convention’s regulations,” he says, pointing out the yard’s “green zone” for storing oil removed from ships. More typically, though, the burden of safety falls on the workers themselves, who are expected to procure their own equipment.
A shop along the beachfront road sells heavily-used safety shoes and industrial workwear. However, at a restaurant nearby, men on a break are wearing sandals and baseball caps, and there are no helmets, goggles, or heavy boots in sight. “Safety gear is a luxury we can’t afford,” says Muhammad, a 44-year-old labourer who didn’t want to give his last name.
We resort to socks as gloves, shirts as masks, even carrying heavy steel barefoot. Pressure is building on lenders, insurers, and investors to spurn laggards and reward responsible recycling — particularly in the EU. The EU requires concrete floors beneath ships being taken apart, with spillways and a fluid recovery system in case of accidents.
However, while the EU is home to 35% of the global fleet, only 7% of its ships are dismantled there. The International Chamber of Shipping, an industry group, says EU-approved facilities are too busy to take its vessels, but yard owners say that’s not the case. In 2021, a dry dock in Scotland was converted into a scrapping facility.
It’s now mothballed. The yards that survive stay in business performing retrofits and repairs, scrapping military craft from EU countries. The managing director of DDR Vessels XXI SL in Spain, Antonio Barredo, says shipbreaking yards such as his can’t begin to compete with Alang, Chattogram, or Gadani.
His labour costs are too high, and Europeans typically pay less for recycled steel than Asian buyers do. Every yard in Europe is “running way below capacity,” Mr Barredo says. “We don’t get enough vessels.
” To make it harder for its ships to be dumped in poor countries, the EU says owners must adhere to rules barring hazardous waste from being exported to countries outside of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. However, freight companies can simply send the vessel to a non-EU port before scrapping it. As long as its final journey doesn’t begin in the EU, the rules don’t apply.
So vessels that had previously harboured regularly in Barcelona, Hamburg, or Rotterdam make their way to destinations further east before heading to the South Asian scrapyards. In 2018, the EU introduced regulations requiring any ship flying the flag of one of its member states to be dismantled in an approved facility such as Mr Barredo’s. Those rules, too, can be avoided — by switching to a “flag of convenience”.
Changing flags according to a ship’s destination, cargo, and condition are now a normal part of operations. One-third of EU-owned vessels don’t fly one of its flags. Most flags of convenience today are issued by tax havens with loose labour regulations and few technical standards, according to HEC Paris business school’s associate professor of finance Guillaume Vuillemey.
“People shop around for a specific set of rules, often designed by consulting firms in big shipping countries,” he says. “It makes it much, much cheaper to operate a ship.” Although treaties require ships to have a “genuine link” to the country where they’re registered, the term isn’t defined, and the rule has never been enforced.
With power in the International Maritime Organisation distributed according to the tonnage of the ships registered to each country, the flags of convenience now control the body. They’re unlikely to embrace any effort to take the “genuine link” clause seriously. Flags of convenience Flags of convenience are a gamble because the lower quality the flag, the greater chance the ship flying it will be inspected at port and possibly detained — raising costs.
However, end-of-life ships which aren’t going to port don’t get inspected. So there’s a relatively new wrinkle in the flags-of-convenience business — the “last-voyage flag”, tailored especially for vessels on their way to the scrapyard. The flag of Palau, a tiny Micronesian nation whose entire population could comfortably fit inside a sports arena, flew over about 0.
001% of the world’s fleet in 2019, but three-fifths of ships on their final voyage, Mr Vuillemey says. Some 12 of the 334 vessels that ended up on a beach in South Asia in 2023 were flagged to landlocked Mongolia. As a big freight hauler, “you’d never bring your ship to Gadani yourself — you just sell it to someone, and a couple of months later the ship ends up there,” Mr Vuillemey says.
“But you have zero responsibility, because it’s not yours any more.” John Stawpert, a manager at the International Chamber of Shipping, says he noticed significant progress on a recent visit to Alang, with some facilities exceeding the Hong Kong rules. “The handling of hazardous waste has improved beyond sight,” he says.
With the Hong Kong standards coming into force, he says, conditions at Gadani, Chattogram, and Alang should continue to improve. Advocates for cleaner, safer dismantling see that as naive. “Almost all the yards in Alang have these statements of compliance” with the Hong Kong principles, says the founder of Shipbreaking Platform, Ingvild Jenssen.
Shipbreaking Platform is a non-governmental organisation that tracks the scrapping of old ships. Those statements are largely meaningless, she says, as the companies issuing them are consultants hired by the yards. A better approach, she believes, would be to ratchet Hong Kong up to the current European level and increase enforcement — so ship-owners can’t just sail out of the EU, switch flags, and send their ships to a South Asian beach.
“EU authorities would be able to go after EU companies independently of the location of the vessel,” she says, “which would make life that much easier.”.
