In scrapping a 10,000-tonne ship, at least 120 tonnes of steel becomes molten and is lost in the sea, a 2015 review found
make a 10,000-tonne container ship disappear? At Alang, a small town in Gujarat, on the western coast of India, it happens regularly. At roadside stalls on its outskirts, shopkeepers sell furniture together with lifeboats; washing machines alongside emergency flares. Nearer the town, stalls give way to warehouses and enormous open-air yards; cranes stretch to the horizon. Ships that look like Lego sets being dismantled sit on a stretch of beach.
A typical operation involves a ship being beached at low tide. Once her fittings and other resaleable parts are removed, hundreds of workers with gas blowtorches clamber over the vessel’s hull, cutting it into huge steel blocks. These are then dropped onto the beach, where they are cut up again before being sold, then rerolled for use in construction.
Alang is just one of many ship-breaking centres in South Asia. Among the others are beaches in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Last year the subcontinent recycled around 90% of the world’s ships by tonnage . Ship-breaking is concentrated in the region for three reasons. Prices for scrap steel are higher than elsewhere , thanks to demand for rerolled steel for construction. Labour costs are lower than at yards in Europe, America or Turkey and safety and environmental regulations are much weaker.
At the Baijnath Melaram shipyard a huge crane barge sits in the water next to a stretch of “impermeable” concrete. “We used to have to winch the blocks up the beach,” says Siddharth Jain, the firm’s business manager. Now, the crane lifts blocks of steel down from the ships directly to the concrete, so that they need never touch the sand.
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