Shipbreaking means what visually comes to mind: breaking old ships into pieces for disposal or recycling. One of the primary areas in the world that specialises in shipbreaking is Bangladesh.
Ship breaking industry started its cruel journey in 1960 when most environmentalists, NGOs and media had no clue to understand the fathom of the brutal impact on the environment, human health, agriculture and the burden on healthcare management.
In addition to its human impact, the shipbreaking industry in Chattogram (formerly known as Chittagong) is destroying environmental ecosystems in Sitakunda Beach.
The ships arriving at Bangladesh to berth at the tidal mud-flat coast of Chattogram to die. The ship scrapping industry is a dirty and dangerous economic activity amid poor transparency and inadequate monitoring systems by the authorities.
Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB), engine oil, spent fuel, and asbestos concentrations at ship recycling yards on the beaches of Chattogram are at alarming levels. The industry in Bangladesh is highly dangerous and unregulated.
The monitoring of the shipbreaking industry by non-government agencies (NGOs) lacks specialised training, expertise and equipment to monitor the dirty business.
The NGO’s only tools they have are non-comprehensive environmental laws, international conventions and guidelines, which the shipbreaking owners dare to flout.
The punishment and punitive actions against the defaulters are very weak and the process is delayed due to bureaucracy and the judiciary is corrupt.
Shipbreaking in Bangladesh has exponentially grown over the decades along the coasts of Chattogram. More than 50 per cent of the gross tonnage dismantled globally is handled on the beach of Chattogram, a “toxic hotspot”.
The shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh are located just outside the major port city of Chattogram. They stretch along the coastline of the Sitakundu area for approximately 15 km.
The country cannot properly manage the extremely dangerous toxic materials that are generated from the dismantling of end-of-life vessels on the beach, outside a contained zone. At the yards, toxic exposure is accepted as the price for domestic economic development and employment, while allowing ship owners from the Global North to exploit weak laws and externalise costs.
Ingvild Jenssen, executive director and founder of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform said that instead of the shipbreaking industry taking responsibility for the cost of sustainable ship recycling, they expose workers in tidal mudflats to unacceptable risks with fatal consequences and cause irreparable damage to sensitive coastal ecosystems.
Most vessels are imported to Bangladesh with false documents stating the vessel is asbestos-free. Based on an asbestos survey done between 2011 and 2020, more than 55 per cent of operating vessels and 50 per cent of all new vessels were found to contain asbestos materials. The powerful shipbreaking industry, which generates more than half of Bangladesh’s raw steel supply, has had a devastating impact on workers’ lives and the environment, and European shipowners are frequently shamed for sending their vessels to Bangladesh for demolition6 with no respite.
Ingvild Jensen, director of the campaigning organisation NGO Shipbreaking Platform, said these companies should nonetheless be aware of what they are doing.
Magsaysay Award recipient and environmental lawyer Syed Rizwana Hasan, also Executive Director of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) said: “European ship owners send their end-of-life tonnage to the beaching yards because that is where they can make the highest profit.
They ought to know that their vessels contain numerous toxic materials, including asbestos, and that the conditions at the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh are appalling. This exploitation of poor coastal communities is for the financial benefit of an already wealthy shipping industry”
An investigation by Bangladeshi journalist Mostafa Yousuf of The Daily Star and Margot Gibbs of Finance Uncovered in the UK exposes how the weak regulatory system gets exploited for permission to scrap vessels containing asbestos and other hazardous materials.
The ship-breaking industry in Chattogram remains extremely dangerous for workers and the environment. The top ship-recycling country in the world has failed to regulate the clandestine business effectively, for which frequent death, injury and pollution continue to be in the headlines.
The story says that shipbreaking started in Bangladesh in 1960 when a cyclone coupled with the tidal surge in the Bay of Bengal washed a Greek ship MD Alpine onto the shore and stuck in the mud flat for months.
After the damaged vessel was declared abandoned, it took more than a year to shred, with no knowledge of the dangers waiting for the workers and the environment.
Whilst activities increased considerably in the 1980s, shipbreaking was not officially recognised as an industry – and thus not regulated – until 2011.
Bangladesh is a top destination for scrapping ships. Since 2020, approximately 20,000 Bangladeshi workers have ripped apart more than 520 ships, far more tonnage than in any other country.
The World Bank has estimated that between 2010 and 2030 Bangladesh will have imported 79,000 tons of asbestos; 240,000 tons of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) and 69,200 tons of toxic paints that originate from end-of-life ships.
In the absence of storage and treatment facilities for hazardous wastes in Chattogram shipbreaking yards, the toxins are typically either dumped into the marine environment or resold, causing further health impacts or re-sold on the second-hand market and cause further harm to surrounding communities.
In 2021, approximately one-third of the ships broken down were dismantled in Bangladesh. The industry directly employs 50,000 people and another 100,000 indirectly and provides around 80 per cent of the country’s steel.
End-of-life ships are considered toxic waste under the Basel Convention because they are full of toxic materials: asbestos is used as insulation; heavy metals like cadmium, lead, and chromium are in paints and coatings for batteries, motors, generators, and cables; mercury is in thermometers, electrical switches, lights, and often in vessels that have operated in the oil and gas extraction sector; oils, fuel, harmful bacteria, and toxic sludge are found in bilge water, sewage, and ballast water.
Most ships headed for the beaches in South Asia were built decades before international rules banned the use of asbestos in shipbuilding in 2011.
“You’ll find asbestos in the gaskets, in the fuel lines, in the seawater lines, in the fire fighting lines,” Wouter Rozenveld an expert on ship recycling explained. “You cannot operate a vessel without these things. The workers who clear this will in decades die of asbestosis.”
Rozenveld said it would only be possible to clean a ship completely after cutting the ship down to its bare steel, which would take months of work from asbestos-trained workers.
Another European expert explained, “This whole concept of pre-cleaning is expensive: it’s extremely expensive and you’d only do it if you were going to scrap the ship in a good yard.”
Every day, the huge cargo ships are taken apart by hand by unskilled labourers recruited from poverty-stricken villages in the north of the country. The labourers do not comply with work safety guidelines, which are not strictly enforced. Nor do labour laws are enforced.
Hundreds of workers are wounded and maimed. None of them received adequate compensation. The wounded and maimed workers have never been provided proper medical care and not to speak about rehabilitation.
There is a strong fluctuation of workers between the yards as most are employed on day wages and often return to their villages during the harvest season.
They work long gruelling hours without holidays, and trade unions are prevented from effectively organising them. When workers attempt to unionise or protest conditions, they are fired, harassed and intimidated.
In 2018, the Brussel-based NGO Shipbreaking Platform documented at least workers who were killed and at least 10 who suffered severe injuries while breaking the massive ships that are beached in Sitakundu. The causes of death at the shipbreaking yards are many, including suffocation, explosions, falls from great heights and crushing due to falling parts of the ship.
Dozens of workers in the Bangladesh yards have died in recent months and years according to local NGOs and media, but more still will suffer early deaths from their exposure to asbestos pollution.
Yet it remains the world’s leading destination for ships to go for demolition and around one in ten of the vessels which arrive there were previously owned by European companies.
A 2019 survey of shipbreaking workers estimated that 13 per cent of the workforce are children. Researchers noted, however, that this number jumps to 20 per cent during illegal night shifts. Many workers interviewed began working at the age of 13.
The average daily salary is between BDT 400 ($3.65) and 600 ($5.47). The workers have been fighting for their labour rights because they do not receive official minimum wages, and do not have access to health facilities or the employer compensates the costs of their treatments. Bangladesh authorities have minimum wage compensation for factories which is rigorously implemented in export-oriented industries.
The hospital building set up by the Bangladesh Shipbreakers Association (BSBA) is operated in conjunction with a private clinic and can only provide treatment for minor injuries. Many workers succumb to their injuries on their way to the closest specialised government hospital in Chattogram city.
Multinational shipping firms appear to have distanced themselves from these deaths in part by selling their end-of-life vessels to so-called cash buyers, many of them are based offshore and their ownership is kept secret. These companies specialise in sending ships to scrap but also provide a firewall between the yards and PR-conscious shipowners.
As a result of working in hazardous conditions, shipbreaking workers are more likely to suffer accidents. These accidents are rarely officially reported due to the lack of transparency on the part of employers and the government.
Accidents are commonly caused by fire and explosions, falling of heavy objects, electrocution, fall from height as well as mental and physical stress and fatigue.
Other significant factors that contribute to the high accident rate are the lack of safety and health training, poor work organisation, inadequate housing and sanitation, inadequate emergency, first-aid and rescue facilities, lack of medical facilities and social protection.
Workers described injuries from falling chunks of steel or being trapped inside a ship when it caught fire or pipes exploded. Lack of accessible emergency medical care at shipyards meant that, in many cases, workers were forced to carry their injured co-workers from the beach to the road and find public transport willing to take the victim to a state-run hospital in Chattogram.
Workers consistently said that they are not provided with adequate protective equipment, training, or tools to safely do their jobs.27 Workers described using their socks as gloves to avoid burning their hands as they cut through molten steel, wrapping their shirts around their mouths to avoid inhaling toxic fumes and carrying chunks of steel barefoot.
In Bangladesh, the life expectancy for men in the shipbreaking industry is 20 years lower than the average.
According to the ILO Guidelines of 2009, “training should be provided to all participants at no cost and should take place during working hours”.
As per the Ship Recycling Rules 2011, “no person shall be allowed to be employed in a shipbreaking yard without appropriate training certificate”.
Besides not having appropriate training and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to correctly perform such dangerous procedures, the workers do not receive a working contract or letter of appointment. Hence, none of the workers have any social security and adequate access to healthcare and compensation packages.
The shipbreaking company’s human resource management officials cleverly collect more than 10 signatures on blank papers and take pictures of the workers but no contract papers are given to the workers.
When the workers suffer injuries in a mishap, the treatment is sometimes either partially or paid, which is rare, depending on the company’s unwritten policy.
However, most of the time the workers do not receive any compensation even if they are not able to work anymore due to their injuries, like amputation of limbs or other life-threatening injuries.
In accordance with the 2011 Shipbreaking and Recycling Rules, after an accident, a yard is supposed to immediately suspend operations for a week but this has not always happened. The absence of nearby hospitals to handle emergencies, poor occupational health and safety practices, systemic labour rights violations, and a lack of transparency from the industry further compound the problems associated with shipbreaking in South Asia. The additional stress on inadequate medical facilities with a shoestring budget of the government hospitals.
Bangladesh is a signatory of the Basel Convention, which is supposed to stop hazardous waste, especially asbestos being dumped in developing countries.
In 2009 the Supreme Court ruled that, in keeping with this convention, ships should be cleared of their hazardous materials before they are imported for demolition in Bangladesh.
Two years later the Bangladesh Supreme Court ordered a ban on beaching giant ships containing asbestos at the coast of Bay of Bengal as illegal.
Despite laws existing in Bangladesh to protect both workers and the environment, these are poorly implemented due to the weak enforcement capacity of the both Department of Environment and the Department of Labour and are deliberately ignored as a result of political pressure.
Most of the end-of-life vessels are imported with fake certificates claiming that they are free of hazardous materials. As a consequence, toxins are not properly detected and safely removed.
The environmental laws and guidelines are regularly flouted by the shipbreaking owners who have political clouts, supervisors and private buyers for illegal markets who also work as the yard’s henchmen.
NGO Shipbreaking Platform’s Bangladesh Coordinator Muhammed Ali Shahin and also programme coordinator for an NGO, Young Power in Social Action (YPSA), said there is an international guideline to remove asbestos from the ships. “Asbestos poisoning can be curbed by dismantling ships in green and environment-friendly shipyards that follow the guideline,” he said.
YPSA has trained 500 workers in the industry in handling asbestos safely, Shahin said. But that is not enough. At the yard, such facilities to handle asbestos safely are absent. Instead of disposing of the asbestos safely, the local buyers are allowed to collect the asbestos waste, which is sold in the illegal market.
Award-winning environmental lawyer Rizwana Hasan said, “The ships that are older than 20 years contain asbestos in the engine room, boiler, and many other places where it requires heat and fire resistance. As per international guidelines, experts should remove asbestos and bury it underground.
But in our country, the guidelines are not followed and asbestos is removed by the general workers who are not told to take protective measures.”
Even after providing healthcare support to workers in the shipbreaking yard, more workers report to hospitals for treatment. Besides diagnosis, the workers have to buy medicine for a full recovery.
The labourers diagnosed with asbestos contamination become too weak to work in the yard. They are fired for ill health with little or no compensation.
The president of the Bangladesh Ship Breakers and Recyclers Association Abu Taher is in denial mode of large-scale asbestos poisoning among ship-breaking workers.
There is no asbestos victim in the industry, as the ships built after 2000 do not carry any asbestos.
“It has been a conspiracy to shut down the prospective ship-breaking industry in Bangladesh,” he accused the media and NGOs of false narrative against the industry.
Several shipbreaking owners claim that they have “separate asbestos decontamination rooms” in Bangladesh and safely dispose of it in a vertical concrete column.
However, BELA and Young Power in Social Action (YPSA), an NGO working to improve the conditions in the shipbreaking yards, said it is news to them that the yards have facilities to contain asbestos pollution.
Asbestos is not only mismanaged at the shipbreaking yards but also re-sold in the second-hand market in Bangladesh. Hundreds of shops housed in two and three-storey markets have sprung up to sell merchandise retrieved from the ships on both sides of the Chattogram-Dhaka highway.
The traders sell from bathroom fittings to kitchenware, from country flags to lifeboats, and navigational equipment to nautical charts. Everything is sold, and nothing remains unsold, including sludge retrieved from the ships.
The furniture shops along the coasts sell cheap “asbestos ovens” for as little as BDT 250 ($2.27), popular with low-wage worker’s kitchenware.
Most important is the shops are selling products made of asbestos such as stoves – asbestos dust covers the area where families live close by. Around the shipbreaking area in Sitakunda, different types of dangerous materials, including cooling powder from LNGs, are easily found in the surrounding communities.
Not only that, the asbestos is later sold in the open market and used in factories to recycle to produce cement, which is illegal and dangerous for the health of people living inside buildings which have been built with spurious cement. The adulterated cement is sold cheaper to under-construction building owners with a catch that the binding with bricks is superior to brand cements sold by different manufacturers.
The European Union (EU) Ship Recycling Regulation (SRR) only applies to ships flagged by an EU state, which allows companies to avoid the EU requirements by transferring a ship’s flag to a different state, known as a “flag of convenience.”
Flags of convenience are sold by flag registries which, in many cases, are private companies operating in a different country from their flag state. As Jenssen of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, said in a 2022 report:
The decisions to scrap these ships under conditions that would not be allowed in the EU are taken in offices in Hamburg, Athens, Antwerp, Copenhagen and other EU shipping hubs. This reality begs for the introduction and enforcement of measures that effectively hold the real beneficial owners of the vessels responsible, regardless of the flags used and/or of the ports of departure.
A new 90-page report, “Trading Lives for Profit: How the Shipping Industry Circumvents Regulations to Scrap Toxic Ships on Bangladesh’s Beaches” released by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the NGO Shipbreaking Platform finds that Bangladeshi shipbreaking yards often take shortcuts on safety measures, dump toxic waste directly onto the beach and the surrounding environment, and deny workers living wages, rest, or compensation in case of injuries.
The report reveals an entire network used by shipowners to circumvent international regulations prohibiting the export of ships to facilities like those in Bangladesh that do not have adequate environmental or labour protections.
European Union audits have identified serious problems at yards that have SoC, including a lack of capacity to properly manage several hazardous waste streams, a lack of appropriate medical facilities for emergencies and systemic violations of labour laws. It is evident that the issuance of SoCs with the HKC, carried out by private companies, does not guarantee that the recycling operations are conducted sustainably and in line with both national and international environmental and labour rights regulations.
The environmental NGOs, probing journalists, human rights organisations, labour unions offices and curious visitors are barred entry into the beach of the shipbreaking yards are located.
The owner’s watchful eyes often chase, assault and attack them to protect the dismantling of vessels and marketing asbestos in illegal markets.
Workers said that increased scrutiny from journalists and NGOs of conditions in the yards over the past few years has led to a tightening of restrictions on communicating with people outside the yards or providing access to the worksites, and several said that they are not allowed to bring their phones into the yard.
Journalists and non-governmental organisations are rarely given access and workers face retaliation for speaking out.
Often outspoken residents were intimidated and slapped with cases by the shipbreaking owners and their henchmen as “intruders” and accused of stealing valuables from their properties.
Police and civil administration do not register complaints from the residents. The police take sides with the owners and business community who are large beneficiaries of the shipbreaking.
Shipbreaking in Bangladesh is strongly criticised by both international and local NGOs due to its dirty and dangerous practices. Concerns include abysmal working conditions, fatal accidents, exploitation of child workers, and severe pollution of the marine environment as well as the dumping of hazardous wastes.
In 2009, following litigation by NGO Shipbreaking Platform member organisation BELA, a landmark decision by the Bangladesh Supreme Court ordered the closure of all shipbreaking yards in Chattogram as none held the necessary environmental clearances to operate. After only two months of closure, the yards re-opened with incomplete authorisations in hand and no change in practice.
In 2016, the Supreme Court therefore issued a contempt rule against both the authorities and shipbreaking yard owners for continued breaches of the 2009 order. The case is still ongoing.
After a decade the government was forced by the Supreme Court to introduce rules to protect workers, an investigation from an independent newspaper in Bangladesh, The Daily Star and Finance Uncovered, suggests that a major part of the country’s regulatory system is a sham.
Similarly, a bill passed in 2018 to reduce the environmental impact of the shipbreaking industry has had limited effect on the delinquent shipbreaking industry.
The shipbreaking industry owners are so influential that they were able to classify shipbreaking as a “less hazardous” activity.
Under the Environment Protection Rules 1997, the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh was first classified as a less hazardous industry (category Orange-B). Later in 2007, an executive order reclassified the industry as a highly hazardous industry (category Red) and stricter measures were introduced.
In November 2021, following strong opposition from yard owners and a recommendation from the Ship Recycling Board under the Ministry of Industries and the Ministry of Forest Environment and Climate Change again downgraded the shipbreaking industry from Red to Orange-B category.
In early March 2023, on the behest of NGOs’ pressure, the sector regained the Red category in the Environment Protection Rules 2023. This means that yard owners have to obtain separate environmental clearance documents for each vessel before dismantling operations start.
Consequently, the Department of Environment should scrutinise all applications and inspect the ships before giving any clearance. Previously, the required clearance could be obtained in only 48 hours.
In its judgment in 2020 the Supreme Court found that the government had failed to implement this system in the case of the United Kingdom-owned North Sea Producer, an ageing oil tanker previously owned by [Danish-owned] Maersk and sent from the UK to be broken up in Chattogram. The court found that the presence of hazardous materials on the vessel had been “deliberately concealed or left vague”.
It singled out a document supplied by a company based in the Caribbean tax haven of St Kitts and Nevis, claiming the ship contained no hazardous materials onboard, including “nil [no]” asbestos. The certificate produced by St Kitts & Nevis company was singled out as ‘unverifiable’ by the Supreme Court.
It was later discovered that the ship had illegal levels of radioactive waste onboard, and according to documents submitted to the court, 500kg of materials containing asbestos was removed from the vessel.
The rules have been amended several times in the last decade, meaning that there has been disagreement over whether they required hazardous materials to be moved from the ship’s structure.
But the Supreme Court ruling in the North Sea Producer case directed the government to “stringently regulate” cash buyers and enforce the pre-cleaning system. Maersk has yet to comment on the matter.
Within the ship recycling industry, companies such as global marketing system (GMS) are commonly known as Cash Buyers. A “Cash Buyer” as the name suggests, is an entity that purchases a vessel for “Cash” from the owners and delivers it to a ship recycling yard on both “delivered” and “as is where is” terms.
“It’s time to go heavily against such malpractices to ensure that cash buyers and their allies in the government are held liable if they continue to resort to their heinous tactics.
“Cash buyers are hiding behind anonymously owned offshore companies so we [Bangladesh] can’t hold them liable for the damage they cause, the environmental lawyer Rizwana Hasan said.”
According to her, cash buyers’ use of anonymous companies protects their true owners from potential liability for the damage they cause.
In June 2023, Bangladesh ratified the Hong Kong Convention (HKC) for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships. As the second-largest flag State in terms of tonnage and commonly used as a flag of convenience, Liberia has also ratified the Convention. With the ratifications of Bangladesh and Liberia, the convention’s ratification requirements are met and the HKC will officially enter into force on 26 June 2025.
Whilst the problems with shipbreaking in the intertidal zone are ignored by the HKC, several yards in South Asia have received the so-called “Statements of Compliance with the HKC” (SoC) without impermeable flooring also in the secondary cutting zone, where hazardous materials are simply left to accumulate in small storage facilities onsite.
In Bangladesh, so far three shipbreaking yards (PHP, Kabir Ship Recycling – Shitalpur and S.N. Corporation Unit 2) have obtained SoCs with the HKC51 although operations still take place on tidal mudflats and there is a lack of proper infrastructure to contain pollutants and to manage several hazardous waste streams.
Efforts should be made to ensure that shipbreaking operations adhere to stringent environmental and labour standards, safeguarding the well-being of workers and minimizing the impact on surrounding ecosystems. Governments, international organizations, and industry stakeholders must collaborate to address these issues and promote sustainable practices in ship recycling that take place in contained and properly equipped platforms.
Those familiar with the practices in Chattogram say while some yards are making efforts to improve worker protections, far more is needed to satisfy HKC standards.
Although the yards now provide protective gear, the workers often remove the protective gear they are provided under pressure to work faster.
“The entry-into-force of the flawed Hong Kong Convention is not a time for celebration, but it will allow for the reopening of the text. We will be calling for changes so that it meets expectations of environmental justice, labour rights and circular economy objectives, and calling on the European Union and responsible ship owners to ensure that the shipping sector does not get away with green washing the current deplorable practices that would never be allowed in their home countries.”
Rizwana Hasan, Award winning environmental lawyer and Executive Director of Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA)
The health effects of the workers’ exposure to poisonous fumes and chemicals, asbestos and various other unidentified pollutants remain unreported at the yards.
Early studies showed that shipbreaking workers exposed to asbestos have elevated mortality due to lung cancer and other cancers compared to the general population.
Several shipbreaking workers have only now started to manifest symptoms of asbestosis such as chest pain and lack of breath asbestos symptoms usually appear many years after the initial asbestos exposure. Despite their weak health condition, most of the sick workers continue to dismantle vessels to feed their families.
Their affected lung capacity reduction varies between 20-60%. Several of the workers who have been identified as victims of asbestos are currently facing phases of the disease that require urgent medical assistance and treatment. Which remains absent for the shipbreaking yard poor labourers.
Asbestos was commonly used in the 1980s and ’90s due to its thermal insulation and fire-resistant properties. A commercial vessel could contain as much as 10 tons of asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) in engine rooms, fuel lines, sea water lines and fireproofing material.
Most vessels beached at the Bangladesh coast with false documents claiming asbestos-free. Based on an asbestos survey done between 2011 and 2020, more than 55% of operating vessels and 50% of all new vessels were found to contain asbestos materials.
According to the American Cancer Institute, asbestos is the name given to six minerals that occur naturally in the environment as bundles of fibres that can be separated into thin, durable threads for use in commercial and industrial applications.
Tiny asbestos fibres are released into the air when ships are dismantled. When asbestos fibres are breathed in, the dusts are likely to be trapped in the lungs and remain there for a long time.
Over time, these fibres can accumulate and cause scars and inflammation, which can affect breathing and lead to serious health problems, including mesothelioma (a relatively rare cancer of the thin membranes that line the chest and abdomen), and cancers of the lung, larynx, and ovary, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
According to the World Health Organisation, currently, about 125 million people in the world are exposed to asbestos in the workplace.
WHO estimates that more than 90,000 people die each year from asbestos-related lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis resulting from occupational exposures. One in every three deaths from occupational cancer is estimated to be caused by asbestos.
People are directly exposed to toxic materials in the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they grow and eat, impacting their health and livelihood.
In Sitakunda neighbourhood, local people are heavily exposed to environmental pollution in water, soil and air. In the last decades, Sitakunda has often been in the headlines for its rapid and unplanned industrialisation as well as for accidents inside shipbreaking yards, steel re-rolling mills and other manufacturing plants.
These aspects highlight the need for stricter enforcement of international waste and labour laws and improved oversight in the shipbreaking industry.
The disease is caused by prolonged exposure to asbestos, a material once prized for its insulating properties but banned throughout the EU and many other countries because it is deadly to those who inhale its fibres. Its use remains legal in Bangladesh.
Incidentally, the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), ship-breaking workers raised asbestos concerns first in 2019.
A study by the Bangladesh Occupational Safety, Health and Environment Foundation (OSHE) found that almost 33 per cent of shipbreaking workers are affected by asbestosis, an incurable disease caused by breathing minerals in the form of dust or fumes.
The health survey, led by asbestosis expert Dr Murali Dhar, among ship-breaking workers in Chattogram, examined 101 workers in two phases and found 33 workers affected with the disease.
Primarily, 33 workers were identified as victims of asbestos poisoning. After a series of tests under the supervision of Dr Kazi Saifuddin Bennor, assistant professor of the National Institute of Diseases of the Chest and Hospital, 25 of those workers were diagnosed with asbestos in their lungs.
Of them, eight had become 60 per cent disabled from the disease. Apart from the ship-breakers, workers of steel factories, re-rolling mills, tin factories and cement factories, where materials from the yards are supplied, are feared may also be facing asbestos hazards.
Such victims with extensive occupational exposure to the mining, manufacturing, handling, or removal of asbestos are at risk of developing asbestosis. “In Bangladesh, ship-breaking workers are at high risk. Symptoms are manifesting in workers who have been working for about 10 years,” said Dr Dhar.
OSHE recommends establishing a specialised hospital for asbestosis in Bangladesh. Presently the hospitals in the country do not have equipment to treat asbestosis, while the number of experts to treat the disease is limited.
Muhammed Ali Shahin of YPSA said: “The scrap ships brought to Bangladesh were built in the 1980s and ’90s. The ships’ engine rooms, decks, cabins and other portions contain asbestos.”
Dr Rajat Shankar Roy Biswas, a medicine specialist at Chattogram Maa-O-Shishu Hospital said “As a result of suffering from asbestosis for a long time, the workers start losing their working capacity and keep suffering from many other symptoms, like chest pain, high blood pressure, and back pain. Longterm asbestosis can also result in lung cancer and mesothelioma, which is almost irreversible.”
Many workers in the ship-breaking industry become victims unknowingly infected with asbestosis, a potentially fatal respiratory disease which scars the lungs, and causes the lungs to shrink permanently. The symptoms of asbestosis – a chronic lung disease – usually do not appear until many years after the initial exposure, according to doctors and industry insiders. It could also lead to cancer, and a disease called mesothelioma.
“There is no way to remove the asbestos particles from the lungs once it is inhaled and the treatment of the diseases caused by it is very expensive, which the poor workers cannot afford. So protective measures to prevent workers from inhaling asbestos in the ship-breaking yards is a better solution,” remarked Dr Rajat.
Another Asbestos-related disease study was conducted jointly by Midori N Courtice, Paul A Demers, Tim K Takaro, Sverre Vedal, S K Ahktar Ahmad, Hugh W Davies, and Zakia Siddique by the School of
Environmental Health, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The study is available in the National Library of Medicine.
Data was collected on clinical and work history, respiratory symptoms, and occupational health and safety practices in shipbreaking yards.
In the 104 male shipbreakers studied, the prevalence of asbestos-related disease was 12 per cent, of which asbestosis accounted for 6%. Knowledge of asbestos and occupational health and safety measures was almost nonexistent among the workers.
Possibly due to the limitation of the study, which describes that the prevalence of asbestos-related diseases is low compared to studies in shipbuilders and repairers, but a risk underestimate could have resulted from challenges identified during study design and implementation including industry noncooperation and a culture of corruption; technological and language barriers; and a regional lack of physician knowledge and research on occupational diseases.
The prevalence of asbestosis was 6 per cent which, despite our “sensitive” case definition, was lower than anticipated given our hypothesis of high asbestos exposure levels.
Knowledge of asbestos by workers was almost nonexistent with a complete lack of education on occupational health and safety measures. While the estimates were lower than expected, we cannot conclude that the prevalence of asbestosis among ship breakers in Bangladesh was low.
The Bangladesh apex court banned the import of vessels containing a range of hazardous materials including asbestos. And demanded that shipowners must submit certificates to the Bangladesh authorities declaring vessels have been “pre-cleaned”.
The cache of “certificates” submitted to, and had been accepted by, the Department of Environment (DoE). But respected ship recycling experts in Europe after verification said the documents were worthless and branded those as “rubbish”.
Although there is no suggestion this vessel contains asbestos, there are serious questions about the authorities’ verification systems.
The government officials admit that the certificates are not genuine, but the officials do not have the means to check the declarations through meaningful inspections.
The DOE office in Chattogram has no means of even testing for asbestos. If the offshore companies’ claims that ships are “safe” for breaking are accepted without any reasonable chance of being verified.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has plans to set up modern laboratories to test such toxic materials. Only then checking of toxic material could be determined and will end the malpractice.
By allowing shipowners to self-certify the toxic waste the ships contain, the government set up a system which was bound to fail and open to potential abuse.
The country’s apex court ruled in a case brought by the BELA against the state in connection with shipbreaking regulations. Its judgment was damning: it found that documents used to import a toxic vessel for scrap in 2016 were “superficially prepared” or “fabricated”.
Environment lawyer Rizwana Hasan lamented: “Officials have been allowing vessels to enter Bangladesh knowing fully well that the country has no preparation to deal with the waste.” Inspectors are then supposed to visit the ships at outer anchorage to check the vessels for hazardous materials before permitting for beaching to be dismantled.
Many of the certificates declare: “Based on the information available, we hereby confirm that the subject vessel [is] not carrying hazardous cargo nor nuclear items on board and presently is not carrying hazardous cargo onboard. As such, the ship is safe without any non-hazardous material.”
A provision that allows shipowners to self-certify the waste is up for abuse; the environment ministry is just not equipped to check toxic materials at scrap-ship yards in Chattogram.
Around half the certificates then list the materials that the ships are clear from. First on the list is asbestos, frequently stating, “Nil – based on the available information.”
Wouter Rozenveld, who runs a ship recycling consultancy which works with yards in the EU, Turkey and China, said the declarations on the certificates are “rubbish”.
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is supporting Bangladesh in its efforts to bring yards up to standards set by the HKC, which sets out rules intended to protect workers and the environment from the damage they could cause.
Under that convention, all ships destined for demolition must have a full Inventory of Hazardous Materials, a detailed document marking the presence and location of all hazardous materials on the ship, and a ship recycling plan agreed with the yard where recycling is set to take place.
While the IMO, shipping companies, and shipbreaking yards promote the HKC as the solution to a safe and sustainable ship recycling industry, experts and activists have long lamented major gaps in the convention that weaken its ability to provide an adequate level of regulation.
Instead of investing time and resources in green-washing unsafe practices, companies should invest in proven safe methods of ship recycling, and they should stop insisting that beaching ships is safe, Human Rights Watch and the NGO Shipbreaking Platform said.
To ensure global capacity to safely recycle the projected massive influx in end-of-life ships over the next decade, shipping companies should invest in building stable platform facilities at a standard that fully protects workers’ rights and includes mechanisms for the downstream management and disposal of waste, Human Rights Watch and the NGO Shipbreaking Platform said. The EU should revise its Ship Recycling Regulation to effectively hold shipping companies liable and stop them from circumventing the law.
American offshore giants Diamond Offshore, Rowan Companies, Tidewater and Transocean are amongst the biggest global dumpers exploiting the environments and impoverished workforce of South Asia,” said Jim Puckett, Director of the US-based Basel Action Network (BAN) a member organisation of the NGO Platform.
These owners use foreign flags to hide their dirty work, but research lays the blame on these US companies, who act in violation of international law and norms.
Steven Kazan, one of the best Plaintiff side attorneys in the United States anticipated a future increase of Mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases in East Asia.
Kazan said, the world, needs to do something, and exporting our asbestos to countries like Bangladesh. Although just a small part, Kazan believes that many of the United States bankruptcy trusts for asbestos should provide compensation to Bangladesh-based exposure to the United States manufactured ships.
The damning 90-page report finds published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) that shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh often take shortcuts on safety measures, dump toxic waste directly onto the beach and the surrounding environment, and deny workers living wages, rest, or compensation in case of injuries.
The report reveals an entire network used by shipowners to circumvent international regulations prohibiting the export of ships to facilities like those in Bangladesh that do not have adequate environmental or labour protections.
“Companies scrapping ships in Bangladesh’s dangerous and polluting yards are making a profit at the expense of Bangladeshi lives and the environment,” said Julia Bleckner, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Shipping companies should stop using loopholes in international regulations and take responsibility for safely and responsibly managing their waste.”
A lack of enforcement of international laws and regulatory standards further enables ships to be scrapped under dangerous and environmentally damaging conditions. Waste declarations for ships imported to Bangladesh are often completed without any oversight, transparency, or clear accreditation, with potentially fatal consequences.
What is alarming is that exporting countries outright ignore the requirements under the Basel Convention to obtain prior informed consent from the importing country and to ensure that end-of life ships are only sent to countries with sufficient capacity for environmentally sustainable management of toxic waste.
Bangladesh envisages that all shipbreaking yards should go green and adopt international compliance guidelines to establish a sustainable shipbreaking and recycling industry.
Unfortunately, due to the twin shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war, which made the import of raw materials scarce and costly, the target seems challenging.
More than 80 per cent of shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh have been closed down in the past few years due to industry pressure stemming from environmental concerns, low prices, and inherent financial challenges due to Bangladesh’s struggling economy.
However, the certification obtained by some shipbreaking yards in the country could help attract more business to the industry, especially as environmental standards become increasingly stringent.
The country now has 20 shipbreaking yards in operation, while the rest, some 130, are trying to resume operations after closures related to COVID-19 and price hikes.
Abu Taher, President of the Bangladesh Ship Breakers’ Association, said, “More yards are becoming green, although a lot of challenges are in place.” All are now interested in green transition, he added.
By complying with strict environmental standards, green shipyards ensure that the shipbreaking process does not harm the environment or the health of workers. On the contrary, the yards prioritise workers.
The environment-friendly shipyards can attract more customers and generate higher profits by differentiating themselves from non-compliant competitors and by accessing premium markets that prioritise sustainability.
However, the cost involved in modernising a shipbreaking yard to make it green is significant, which the Bangladesh Ship Breakers Association estimates to be over BDT 300 million (US$2.73 million). It is a big challenge among others.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- The Industries Ministry recommends that asbestos decontamination room in the yard would significantly contain the threats to human health and ecosystem;
- European Union should revise the law to close loopholes, promote safe, sustainable ship recycling;
- Certification of safe recycling should be issued by a competent international agency;
- International compliance must be implemented by the shipbreaking industry, like other export-oriented factories;
- The shipbreaking industry must be transparent and accountable to government laws and guidelines;
- The Basel Convention and Hong Kong Convention must be strictly implemented by the countries where unregulated shipbreaking and recycling is rampant;
- Shipping companies should invest in building standard platform facilities that fully protect workers’ rights and handle waste disposal;
- The shipbreaking industry should be environment friendly, sustainable, safety and security compliance.
