Myths around the hazardous waste trade of shipbreaking

Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish traces what happens to trash, from the workings of the scrap metal industry to Western nations exporting their plastic waste. The book looks closely scrutinises the work of ship-breaking—“one of the most dangerous ways of making a living in the world, statistically deadlier than mining,” and the functioning of the industry, which “claims it is alleviating the climate crisis by sending poison-laden cruise ships to poor countries in order that despondent communities of migrants can dismantle them by hand and—almost invariably—get killed in the process, either instantaneously, struck by a collapsing mass of steel, or slowly, through lung cancer or any number of illnesses contracted during the work.”

Alang, in Gujarat, the largest shipbreaking yard in the world in terms of the number of dismantlers employed, has witnessed the effects of this industry, from hazardous elements in its water bodies to lung damage among workers. In this excerpt from the book, Clapp contrasts the myths around the industry with the reality in places such as Alang.

In many respects the world of shipbreaking as we know it today attempts to trace its origins to a fairy-tale-like incident said to have occurred along a Bangladeshi beach in 1969, the year a vicious cyclone whipped across the Indian Ocean and flung a Greek-owned ship called the MD Alpine up onto a flat stretch of shore somewhere south of the great city of Chittagong. Numerous attempts to refloat the MD Alpine failed. And so it sat—for five years, or so goes the story, until a local Bangladeshi steel company bought it and, over the course of several months, directed a ragtag band of locals to chop it to pieces, then drag the resulting chunks of rusty metal inland. After a few months the MD Alpine had vanished from sight. It was as if the vessel had never existed in the first place.

A mysterious foreign ship that offers itself up to a desperate community along a distant shore of Southeast Asia—the tale of the MD Alpine is the foundation myth the shipbreaking industry likes to tell about itself. And it is completely false. Ships have been getting “recycled” for centuries—Tudor England reused the timbers of decommissioned galleons to construct roofs in homes and pubs—but modern shipbreaking dates to the early 1950s. And before it was offloaded onto poorer countries, it was conducted in the same countries, and often in the same ports, where ships were actually built: As late as the 1960s, there were huge ship dismantling yards across the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. In the 1970s, as those countries got wealthier, as the drive to protect their environments and the safety of their workers became objects of more and more oversight and legislation, an irony presented itself: Other countries’ environments and workers appeared increasingly attractive and expendable. Ships ceased being the responsibility of those nations that disproportionately reaped the value of the commerce they facilitated.