Month: October 2017

Press Release – Indian authority shuts NGOs out from Alang yards

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The NGO Shipbreaking Platform expresses dismay over the continued failure of the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) to be transparent and to grant civil society access to see the working and environmental conditions at the shipbreaking yards in Alang. For the past two months, the GMB has turned a cold shoulder to repeated requests by the Platform, via the Indian member organisation Toxics Link, to visit the shipbreaking yards on the tidal beach of Alang, where toxic vessels are broken without containment or stable platforms that other recycling methods provide. By refusing to reply to the requests to visit the yards, the GMB has opted to keep the negative environmental and labour impacts of the operations at Alang out of sight.

 

Last year, also the European Community Shipowners’ Associations (ECSA) and the Danish shipping line Maersk excluded the Platform from joining field visits they organised to Alang. Maersk recently reversed its ship recycling policy and began breaking ships on the Indian tidal shore. The return to the beach by Maersk has had the devastating effect of legitimising across the industry the beaching method, which inherently pollutes coastal areas and exposes communities to toxins, conditions that the GMB wants to conceal.

 

“In dismissing the Platform’s request to visit Alang, the GMB has chosen to protect industry attempts to green-wash the dirty and dangerous breaking of ships on beaches. This lack of openness is disappointing and represents a decision by the GMB to keep Indian ship recycling in the dark ages”, says Ingvild Jenssen, Director and Founder of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform.

 

The European Commission is anticipated to prohibit the recycling of EU-flagged ships in beaching yards when it publishes its upcoming list of approved ship recycling facilities in non-EU countries. The EU list represents an important turning point for sustainable ship recycling by setting a benchmark for an industry in which standards have been historically absent.

 

Platform publishes South Asia Quarterly Update #14

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There were a total of 227 ships broken in the third quarter of 2017. Of these, 124 ships ended up on beaches in South Asia for dirty and dangerous breaking [1]. Between July and September, one worker lost his life at a shipbreaking yard in Alang, India. Another worker was reported seriously injured in Chittagong, Bangladesh.
 

 

Due to the annual monsoon season, activities remained slow at the South Asian shipbreaking yards over the summer months. However, when the breaking took up again in September, one worker, Ashok Yadav, was reported killed whilst at work at shipbreaking plot no. 14 in Alang, India. Following his death, a letter denouncing the unsafe working conditions at the shipbreaking yards in Alang was sent to Indian Government officials by Toxics Watch Alliance. Around the same time, Md. Shohag – 21 years old – was seriously hurt while torch-cutting a vessel at Zuma Enterprise in Chittagong, Bangladesh, when an iron plate hit him on the left foot and stomach, causing severe injury.

 

It is not due to a lack of awareness concerning the dire working conditions that ship owners continue to favour the infamous beaching yards in South Asia. Rather, it is the fact that dirty and dangerous breaking brings in more money, as there is (1) little or no investments in proper infrastructure to contain pollutants and ensure safe working conditions; (2) the proper disposal of hazardous wastes is overlooked; and (3) migrant workers are exploited.

 

Moreover, the prices offered for ships this third quarter have been high in South Asia, especially when compared to the figures of the first half of the year. Monsoon rains caused a shortage of local product being available to the domestic steel mills and have, therefore, driven prices for end-of-life ships up. Whilst a South Asian beaching yard can pay about USD 400/LDT, Turkish yards are currently paying slightly less than the USD 250/LDT offered by Chinese yards.

 

Greek ship owners have, unsurprisingly, sold the most ships to the beaching yards with 11 beached vessels this quarter, followed by South Korea and Singapore with 6 vessels each. Shipping companies from the United States sold 5 vessels. Singaporean Continental Shipping Line remains the worst corporate dumper, though it currently shares this position with the Greek Anangel Shipping Enterprises and the Iranian Iran Shipping Lines. In total, these companies had three vessels each beached in South Asia in this quarter. Bermuda-based Berge Bulk, Greek Costamare, Swedish Holy House Shipping, and American SEACOR are close runner-up’s, with two ships each sold for dirty and dangerous scrapping on the beach. Brazilian-owned product tanker LOBATO, which was reportedly sold by Petrobras to Indian breakers, ended up on the muddy shores of Chittagong instead. Notably, no tanker was sold to the Gadani yards in Pakistan following the ban on tankers due to the major explosion on the ship ACES on the 1st of November of last year.

 

Although 33 out of the 124 beached vessels this quarter were European-controlled, only three of these had a European flag when they arrived on the beach. All ships sold to the beaching yards pass via the hands of scrap-dealers, also known as cash-buyers, that often re-register and re-flag the vessel on its last voyage. In this regard, flags of convenience, in particular those that are grey- and black-listed under the Paris MOU, are used by cash-buyers to send ships to the worst breaking locations. Almost half of the ships sold to South Asia this quarter changed flag to the grey- and black-listed registries of Comoros, Niue, Palau, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Togo just weeks before hitting the beach. These flags are not typically used during the operational life of ships and offer ‘last voyage registration’ discounts. Importantly, they are grey- and black-listed due to their poor implementation of international maritime law.

 

Efforts to counter the shipping industry’s crave for cash at the detriment of workers and the environment in South Asia are being brought to the attention of enforcement authorities and Courts. In Bangladesh, the Platform has been successful in taking legal action to halt the breaking of the FPSO North Sea Producer, which was illegally exported from the UK in 2016. Moreover, German authorities have been asked by the Platform to hold ACL, a subsidiary of Italian Grimaldi Group, liable for the illegal export of two ships, the Cartier and the Conveyor, to India.

 

NOTE

 

[1] During the third quarter of 2017, the following number of vessels were broken in other locations: 42 in Turkey, 35 in China, and 26 in the rest of the world.

 

Platform News – Atlantic Container Line steaming for sunshine

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Grimaldi Group’s subsidiary ACL illegally exports toxic waste to South Asia, while authorities are inert

 

During the summer, the Swedish-flagged ATLANTIC CARTIER and ATLANTIC CONVEYOR, the two last G3 vessels operated by the Italian Grimaldi Group’s subsidiary Atlantic Container Line (ACL), were sold for demolition. The German competent authorities were alerted about the imminent illegal export of the ships from the port of Hamburg and prompted to take action to stop the vessels from departing. Despite the warnings and the clear signs that the ships were destined for scrap, the authorities did not halt the ships. The ATLANTIC CARTIER arrived in Alang, India, on the 20th of September, and the ATLANTIC CONVEYOR hit the beach on the 7th of October, after vessel tracking providers curiously indicated that the container carrier was “Steaming 4 Sunshine”.

 

 

International waste laws and the EU Waste Shipment Regulation are usually circumvented by ship owners who falsely declare that end-of-life ships are in continued operational use when leaving a port, thereby concealing the fact that they are destined for scrapping and have, therefore, become a waste. The cases of the CARTIER and the CONVEYOR are no exception.

 

The German authorities were not the only ones that have been contacted before the vessels’ final voyage. Also authorities from Canada and the UK, countries through which the CARTIER and the CONVEYOR sailed before arriving in Hamburg for their last EU port call, knew that the ships had been sold to the beach; yet, when questioned, ACL did not reveal that the ships were sold for breaking. Once having left the EU, both vessels operated for a short while in South-Eastern Africa – still under the same name, flag and ownership – waiting for the attention on them to fade. During that time, ACL contacted the Swedish authorities asking for advice on which steps should be taken if the company decided to recycle the ships. Despite the recommendations of Sweden to scrap the vessels in the EU or in an OECD country, there was no way to ensure that these recommendations would be followed, since at that point the ships were no longer in the EU. Rather, it is clear that this communication was a way for ACL to make it seem like the company had acted diligently by seeking advice from the flag-state, as well as to fraudulently make it seem as the decision to dispose of the container carriers was only taken once outside of EU waters.

 

According to the German port authorities, there was no evidence base for the arrest of the vessels, even though the logos of both the CARTIER and the CONVEYOR had been painted over before the final voyage. Moreover, it was well-known within the industry that these two sister ships would be sold for breaking in the summer, as ACL itself indicated that the ships would be scrapped on the cash-buyer GMS’ website last year. In light of this, the Platform has recently sent aletter to the German authorities asking them to hold Grimaldi Group’s ACL accountable for having breached European waste laws.

 

End-of-life sales to South Asian yards are done with the help of a cash-buyer, a company specialised in trading end-of-life vessels to the dirty and dangerous beaching yards. It is not the first time that Grimaldi Group sends its ships to be broken on the beaches: the ATLANTIC CONCERT and ATLANTIC COMPASS were beached in Alang last year. In 2016, during an official meeting in Rome, the Platform raised serious concerns regarding the more than 90 Italian-owned end-of-life vessels that had been sent to dirty and dangerous scrapping yards in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan in the last seven years. The Platform advised the Italian Ship Owners Association, including representatives of Grimaldi Group, to stop selling their end-of-life vessels to unscrupulous cash buyers, and urged the Italian ship owners to ensure the safe and environmentally sound recycling of their ships. Hence, it is clear that the Platform’s message has not been taken into consideration.