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by Shirish Nadkarni Mumbai, Lloyd's List

The two 'green' groups are demanding that shipowners and shipbreakers co-ordinate to remove toxic materials from a vessel prior to its scrapping, ensure that working conditions are safe and the environmental record clean.

These points formed the crux of arguments in papers presented at a recent workshop, entitled 'Challenges to the Ship Recycling Industry: Environment and Safety', by Marcelo Furtado, toxic trade co-ordinator for Greenpeace, and Ravi Agarwal of BAN.

"Shipbreaking has been one of the most hazardous forms of toxic trade that continues in violation of national and international laws," Mr Furtado said.

"A scrapped vessel contains a wide range of toxic substances, most of which have already been defined as hazardous waste under the Basle Convention, to which India is a signatory."

The activists claimed to have undertaken exhaustive studies of shipbreaking yards in non-OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, and found that the operations did not constitute environmentally sound management, as required by the Basle Convention.

"Ships destined for breaking yards contain hazardous wastes like asbestos, poly chloro butadiene (PCB), hydraulic fluids, paints containing lead and other heavy metals, tributyltin or anti-fouling coatings, contaminated holding tanks, and other such substances," said Mr Agarwal.

"These wastes are extremely dangerous to human health and the

environment when ships which have them on board are scrapped in the yards. The conditions in scrapyards in Asia have been documented to be extremely dangerous and damaging to the health of the workers, the surroundings and the environment."

Indian demolition yards at Alang, Sosiya and Mumbai accounted for around 3.25m ldt of scrapped ships in 1999, which is approximately 75%-80% of the total world shipbreaking industry. The other major Asian players in the field are Pakistan and China.

According to Mr Furtado and Mr Agarwal, the Basle Convention prohibits the export of hazardous waste from developed OECD countries to developing non-OECD countries. The convention also bans the export of such wastes to countries that have prohibited their import.

"Each party is required to prohibit the import of hazardous wastes if it has reason to believe that the wastes in question will not be managed in an environmentally sound manner," said Mr Agarwal.

The first instance of such prohibition took place as recently as in December 1999, when Belgium arrested in Antwerp the UK bulk carrier Northbank, which had been bound for scrapping in Asia.

The Belgian authorities ruled that a European ship bound for an Asian scrapyard was a hazardous waste export, and subject to the European Union hazardous waste exports ban, which has been in place since 1998.

Commenting on the Indian legal situation, Mr Furtado argued that the import of vessels containing hazardous substances was also a clear violation under the Indian law.

He pointed out that, following Greenpeace action on the high seas near the Alang shipbreaking yard in December 1999, the Supreme Court had intervened and ordered an investigation into the 'possible violation' of its 1997 order that banned import of hazardous wastes.

"In fact, the Central Pollution Board, in its environmental guidelines for shipbreaking industries has declared that old vessels containing or contaminated with substances like lead, cadmium, PCB and asbestos are, as per the Basle Convention, classified as hazardous," he said.

Even as the Indian shipbreaking industry tried hard to defend itself and its working practices at the workshop, a much more balanced and practical viewpoint was presented by N Wijnolst of the Delft University of Technology, Dutch Maritime Network. Mr Wijnolst claimed that enforcing the Basle Convention by itself was not the solution, although it had certainly become a real threat in the course of the last one year. The arrest of the Northbank at Antwerp had merely been a foretaste of things to come, he felt.

"The problem is that the Basle Convention would force shipowners to remove waste material from the ships before they were towed to a shipbreaker's yard, at a price that would probably exceed the current scrap price," he said. "That would be hardly tenable for the owners."

The Dutch expert felt that ship recycling needed to be handled in the same way as other international regulatory issues.

However, since the jurisdiction of the International Maritime Organisation regulatory powers stopped at the territorial waters of a shipbreaking nation, everything that happened after the vessel entered the country's territorial waters became the responsibility of the local government.

"Therefore, the current working practices regarding safety and the environment are the formal responsibility of the local industry and their governments," he said.

Since the threat by environmentalists was very real, Mr Wijnolst suggested that positive action in ship recycling countries was required to defuse the situation. He firmly believed that two actions were required by the shipbreakers and government authorities.

"First and foremost, you must create a working group comprising local and foreign experts, which would define a number of practical measures to improve workers' safety at the shipbreaking yards," he said.

"The group should make an agenda to remedy the current unsafe practices and propose actions to improve the situation structurally. It should also define the amount of investment that would be required to solve the problem."

The second joint action that needed to be taken, according to Mr Wijnolst, was to create an Environment Working Group, in order to reorganise the creation of standards, reception facilities and the logistics of re-export of hazardous wastes that could not be dealt with locally.

"What also needs to be organised is control of the waste book-keeping at the scrapyards and the formulation of investment plans for facilities," he said.

"I am confident that, if the maritime industry, especially shipowners, have to choose between the application of the Basle Convention and funding a local safety and environment management programme, their co-operation could be almost taken for granted, since they would definitely choose the latter option," said Mr Wijnolst.

The Dutch expert felt that an annual fund of $50m would be a minimum figure needed to start addressing the problems of the shipbreaking industry. If, however, there was a sense of urgency in the maritime industry, the fund could be launched with an amount of $100m per annum.

"A quick method to raise this money would be to discount the cost of waste removal from the value of the vessel to be scrapped," Mr Wijnolst said. "In fact, this is a practice being adopted in China, where shipowners allow a discount for the scrap vessel to the tune of about 20% of its value."

Mr Wijnolst, however, added that this was a route that could work only if supervision at both the local government level and that of the international industry took place, because most shipbreakers would be sorely tempted to put the discount amount into their own pockets.

"If the shipbreaking industry is able to implement this solution, then the aggregate discount per annum, assuming 4m ldt of ships to be scrapped, amounts to $100m," he said. "This would be sufficient to finance the safety and environmental investments."

It is a revealing piece of information for Indian scrapyards that, with China having taken the initiative to implement change in the field, it is fast becoming a preferred destination for scrap vessels. Indian shipbreakers need to show a sense of urgency if they are not to lose out on the goose that lays the golden eggs.