Just weeks before the Hong Kong Convention (HKC) for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships is set to enter into force on 26 June, another shipbreaking worker died in Alang—the world’s largest ship dismantling site—at a facility that claims to already be compliant with the Convention’s standards [1].

On 20 May, 20-year-old Satur Bhai, from Bhara Para village in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar District, fell to his death while dismantling the vessel REM (IMO 9157739) at Plot No. 50. Without a safety harness, he was tasked with removing furniture from the ship’s seventh level. He was employed as a begari (helper)—a position typically untrained, underpaid, and unprotected.

The REM, formerly sailing under the South Korean flag as SK SUPREME, was reflagged to St. Kitts and Nevis before being dumped in Alang. This deliberate flag-switching is a textbook case of regulatory evasion, allowing the vessel’s beneficial owner—South Korea’s SK Shipping Co. Ltd—to sidestep international safety and environmental norms, and to obtain the highest profit for the end-of-life asset.

Despite growing scrutiny, dangerous and abusive practices remain the norm in Alang where ships are scrapped on tidal mudflats. And while the HKC aims to regulate the industry, its weak provisions threaten to legitimise these very conditions. 

Satur Bhai’s death is not isolated. In these last five years at least 10 workers have lost their lives taking apart the global fleet in Alang under conditions that would never be allowed in major ship owning countries, including South Korea. With 90 percent of the global fleet still being scrapped on three beaches in South Asia, the shipbreaking sector is marked by systemic neglect, opaque ownership structures, and a race to the bottom in environmental and labour protections.

This latest fatality follows renewed calls on South Korea to end the dumping of end-of-life vessels on South Asian shores. The export of hazardous waste—including ships laden with toxic paints, asbestos, and residue oils—to countries without proper containment and disposal infrastructure contravenes the Basel Convention on the Control of the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal, to which South Korea is a party.