Where ships die, people die too

After 25-30 years, ships are at the end of their sailing life. These 'end-of-life ships' are then sold and dismantled to recover the valuable steel. In the 1970s' shipbreaking was mostly carried out in Europe. Performed at docks, it was a highly mechanised industrial operation with serious safety regulations, as these ships contain huge amounts of toxic waste and hazardous materials that need to be removed with high precaution. But the costs of upholding environmental, health and safety standards increased, so the shipping industry moved to poorer Asian states.

Rich and poor

Rich countries are now disposing of their old, obsolete ships by breaking them up for scrap in poor Asian countries. The costs of doing so in these countries are very low: almost no electricity or machines are used, and workers (among them children) earn no more than $2.50 (82c) a day.

This is very good business for the shipowners: they extract an average of $1.9 million profit per ship - and now that steel prices are rising, they earn even more.

Greenpeace estimates that 90 per cent of such ships are broken up in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and Turkey. Workers there scrap the ships without any protection, dismantling them with their bare hands. They break the ships with torch cutters and their bare hands - unprotected from toxic substances, explosions and falling steel.

Many are injured or killed by suffocation or explosions, many are expected to contract cancer due to asbestos dust. The shipbreaking industry is one of the most deadly in the world. Poor shipbreaking countries cannot afford to regulate or clean up the results of this disastrous process.

Malta and the EU

Without urgent action from Malta and the European Union, the human and environmental tragedy of shipbreaking is about to get much worse. A worldwide ban on single-hull tankers came into force a week ago - on April 5. Over the next five years more than 2,000 ships are to be taken out of the waters and scrapped. But the question remains: where will they go and who will be responsible to see that these ships are scrapped in a safe and sound manner?

The EU successfully achieved the global accelerated phasing out of single-hull oil tankers but did not provide measures for ensuring the safe and clean breaking up of these ships. To protect the beaches of the EU, we will sacrifice the beaches of India, Bangladesh and Turkey.

The EU now needs to ensure proper follow-up, so that the problem is not simply exported to vulnerable workers in developing world shipbreaking yards. Greenpeace emphasises the need to extend environmental legislation to end-of-life tankers as a matter of urgency to prevent an Asian nightmare.

Threat to Asia

The global ban threatens to dump thousands of toxic ships on shipbreaking yards of poor countries. More than 1,000 tankers are expected to be scrapped in 2005, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates - and scares environmentalists and local people living in these areas.

The Indian government is ready to open up new shipbreaking yards on yet pristine beaches, despite the fierce protests of fishermen and other local groups. The decision threatens to turn clean beaches into toxic ship graveyards.

People living in the area are strongly opposing the government's plans, which are threatening their livelihood and irreversibly contaminating the mangrove forest providing natural protection to Kakinada.

While doing research on existing single-hull oil tankers subject to phase-out regulation through 2005, it became clear to Greenpeace that the well-known lack of transparency in the shipping industry is also a critical gap within the implementation and enforcement of the phase out regulation.

The EU cannot carry out a regulatory function without one definitive and consolidated vessel list from an authoritative regulatory body.

Several studies available on single-hull oil tankers subject to phase-out regulations have considerable factual discrepancies.

Fourteen per cent of European-flagged tankers are under the Maltese flag. For tankers which are European-flagged and at the same time owned by a European country, Malta is the leading country with 61 single-hull oil vessels, thereby carrying serious responsibility in the issue of shipbreaking.

Malta has to play a leading role in ensuring the enforcement of the EU Waste Shipment Regulation. It has to fight the lack of transparency in shipping and to develop a definitive and consolidated list of single-hull oil tankers subject to phase-out regulations. Greenpeace also demands an immediate commitment from EU transport ministers and the European Commission that the toxic burden of Europe's single-hull oil tankers will not end up on Asian beaches.

Greenpeace representatives last year met Environment and Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino and Competitiveness and Communications Minister Censu Galea, who is also responsible for maritime issues. Both ministers promised to consider measures, yet nothing has changed, and people continue to die.

Will there be any change? When will we see that the flag states no longer dump their waste on faraway beaches, exploiting some of the poorest communities in the world? That's a question for the Maltese government to answer. In the meantime, ships keep going to their end destination, to what once was paradise beaches, but today is a living image of hell.

Anne Muscat Scerri is campaign director of Greenpeace Mediterranean