A glimmer of hope?
Posted on | July 13, 2010 | No Comments
Could it be that the circle of responsibility is widening? When the Clay Maitland blog was founded, one of its guiding principles was that matters of safety were by their nature matters of common responsibility too.
While the robustness of that idea has yet to be fully tested, its tenets were examined by demolition brokers at Informa’s recent Ship Recycling event. Scrapping ships is a business swaddled in double-speak and obfuscation: sustainable recycling, end-of-life ships, sale for demolition. All of these suggest a hi-tech and closely-monitored approach to treating what amounts to hazardous waste.
The reality could not be further from the truth of course, with brokers working to secure margin, owners looking for one last profit and cash buyers taking the ships to (in almost all cases) beach them on shorelines in South Asia, where swarms of low paid workers will strip every last usable piece, along with a deal of toxic and hazardous materials.
Even when the IMO’s Hong Kong Convention convention is ratified, this is unlikely to change but the convention is designed to at least list the toxic materials onboard and seek to lever up standards by applying both the market and CSR to the yards located in recycling states.
Between that utopia and the reality of now lies a phalanx of shipbrokers. The broker is there to offer added value and so it proved during their session of the conference. With only one exception, they agreed that brokers could act as a source of knowledge and data on best practice, encouraging owners to make ‘the right’ choices.
This is pretty theoretical but if it works for Equasis, why not recycling yards? If owners could be encouraged to anonymously pool knowledge then brokers would be better placed to advise other owners on a yard’s compliance or otherwise with Hong Kong.
Some do this already of course but there is a role here for a third party to act as clearing house for the information and provide owners with at least one tool to help them recycle ships at yards which are trying to improve their standards.
Even this is a sticking plaster over a bullet wound. Scrapping is the industry’s last huge, dirty secret: a shameful nexus of greed and globalisation, justified with the spurious claim that the yard workers are grateful for the employment the practice brings.
No wonder that the industry is beginning to move towards scrapping in China where, at least the ships are docked, before being dismantled. As the conference heard, this is no guarantee by itself of better standards but it provides at least a glimmer of hope.
Owners cannot rely on media coverage either, because demonstrating ‘green recycling’ is perilously close to being a good news story and therefore of little interest to editors. No, recycling has become a CSR issue for shipping. What a shame then that large parts of the industry refuse to put any store by the concept and prefer to haggle for the last dollar.
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