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By William Langewiesche, Greenwire

Western ship owners sell aged ships to the international strip market at Alang where the scrap steel from a single vessel can bring in $1 million.

But the scrap practice, known as shipbreaking, is exposing local workers to the Western World's pollution.

In 1998, Greenpeace started a worldwide campaign to reform ship scrapping, a project directed primarily against Alang, which was "unpolluted" before the shipbreaking industry moved to its shores in the 1980s (Greenwire, Feb. 19, 1999). A 1999 Greenpeace report found the beach "powerfully poisonous."

Roughly 40,000 impoverished Indian men "recycle" half of the world's condemned ships on Alang, a six mile, oil-coated beach strewn with industrial debris and lined with almost 200 ships in different stages of dissection. A common saying in Alang is "every day one ship, every day one dead" from accidents, explosions or pollution exposure. The men make one to two dollars a day plus whatever they can earn from selling secondhand merchandise found on the boats at a roadside market.

But most shipbreakers resent environmentalists' efforts to reform the industry. Shipbreaking and the industries that stem from it have provided an income, although meager, to as many as one million Indians who otherwise would not have one.

Shipbreaker Pravin S. Nagarsheth: "The fact remains that workers at Alang are better paid and are probably safer than their counterparts back in the poor provinces."

With Greenpeace pushing to heavily reform shipbreaking, many Indians feel as though the West is trying to take away one of its few sources of income.

A nephew of a shipbreaking manager: "The question I want to ask environmentalists is if you should want to die first of starvation or pollution."