ZYMA ISLAM

Out of 446 ships scrapped worldwide, 170 ended up in Chattogram beaches, making Bangladesh the biggest dumping yard for end-of-life vessels in the world last year.

Of them 159 were built before 2002, the year the International Maritime Organisation banned the use of cancer-causing material asbestos on ships. It is highly likely that these ships had asbestos in them as the mineral was widely used in ships for insulation.

Among the ships scrapped, 59 were owned by Chinese shipping companies while companies based in Thailand and Hong Kong sent 15 each, according to a list of ships dismantled worldwide released by NGO Shipbreaking Platform.

Japanese and South Korean companies sent eight ships each while the UAE, Greek, Singaporean, Russian, and Indonesian companies sent six each.

None of these ships carried flags of the country where these companies are based. Instead, they carried “flags of convenience”, a practice whereby owners register a ship with a country other than that of the ship’s owners for certain benefits or to avoid tax or reduce operating costs. This conceals the actual owner.

They had flags of St Kitts & Nevis, Sierra Leone, Comoros, Liberia, Panama, Gabon and other countries.

European Union Ship Recycling Regulation mandates that vessels carrying EU flags can only be scrapped in yards approved by the EU. The scrap yards in Chattogram are not EU approved.

The six Greek ships that were scrapped in Chattogram carried the flags of Comoros, Bahamas, and Liberia.

Japan is a signatory to the Hong Kong Convention, a United Nations treaty by the International Maritime Organisation that mandates ships are not recycled in ways that harm human lives and the environment. Bangladesh has also been a signatory since last year.

The eight Japanese ships also carried flags of convenience, namely St Kitts & Nevis, Mongolia, Panama and Nauru.

The NGO platform said, “Almost half of the ships beached in 2023 (globally) changed their original flag to a grey-or-black-listed flag registry just weeks before hitting the beach.”

By “grey-or-black-listed”, the platform meant countries that were classified as non-compliant by the Paris MoU on Port State Control, an administrative body governing standards in the coasts of Europe and North America.

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