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Deutsche Presse-Agentur

The ships are dismantled in a manner that no safety measures are taken to protect the workers handling them and the overall environment from the chemicals released from the ships, the report by German Greenpeace experts Judit Kanthak and Andreas Bernstorff and Nityanand Jayaraman of India said.

Addressing a press conference to release the report Kanthak said study of samples collected by a Greenpeace team from Alang, the world's biggest scrapyard in the western state of Gujarat led a German occupational health expert to conclude that lack of safeguards in handling the pollutants meant that every fourth worker in Alang must be expected to contract cancer. The ships are particularly prized for their high quality steel which constitutes at least 95 per cent of the vessel but the remaining five per cent includes material made from toxins like asbestos, heavy metals like lead and cadmium and various kinds of oils which need to be disposed of, the study said.

Kanthak said in a cargo ship weighing thousands of tons, the toxic material could amount to few hundred tons.

Jayaraman said up to 400 peole are dying every year at Alang due to the contaminants. A Greenpeace statement quoting a report in the Baltimore Sun newspaper of the United States said there is about one funeral per day at Alang. The study which covered Bombay besides Alang said all the contaminants examined by the Greenpeace activists during their investigations in the two shipyards were banned from being exported to non-OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations under the Basel convention on toxic substances.

The investigators found "dramatic to substantial workplace contamination" from the toxic materials in the ships paints besides asbestos stripped from the ships which was everywhere in the working area, Greenpeace said.

The study said asbestos was stripped from the ships without observing safety rules and providing protection to workers from the highly carcinogenic chemical which is almost the sole source of several types of cancer. Morever highly toxic substances from the ships particularly tin lead and cadmium compounds enter the water harming the entire acquatic ecosystem. Waste fuel and bilge oil are either pumped into the sea polluting it or burnt producing further pollutants like carbon monoxide and other toxic hydrocarbons, the report said.

Kanthak warned that "even if activities were stopped at these sites the high concentration of some of these toxins in the sediment and subsequent release into the environment will ensure ongoing contamination at these sites for decades".

To check hazards, Greenpeace called for inventory of toxics abroad aging ship, moratorium on additional shipwrecking capacity in non-OECD countries and safeguards for removing toxic substances from ships.

It also pleaded for re-export of toxic material from ships to OECD countries for disposal until mechanisms are in place for decontamination before scrapping the ships.

As a long term measures it called for building "safe ships" built with environment-friendly material which can be easily dismantled without endangering the scrapyard workers.