Bangladesh Shipbreakers Roll Back Environmental Standards

Bangladesh's government repealed an environmental standard set in January that would require that the shipbreaking industry to prevent release and exposure of toxic chemicals. More than half of the world's retired cargo ships and supertankers end their lives beached on the coast of Bangladesh where thousands of workers with primitive tools demolish them for scrap metal and building materials. The workers could be exposed to asbestos and harmful organic chemicals left behind in fuel tanks and giant mechanical structures. The government decided to repeal the environmental protection, passed just last August, due to the struggling shipbreaking industry and soaring domestic cost of iron. Environmentalists slammed this decision, saying that the Bangladesh government was condemning their country to polluted beaches and an abusive shipbreaking industry.

Although some of the ships being broken down share a scale with skyscrapers, most of the work is performed by thousands of Bangladeshi armed with nothing but hard hats, sledgehammers, and the occasional cutting torch. These men break and cut their way through the ship and its contents while still on it. Men breaking out steel bulkheads and operating cutting torches often deal with the ship shifting under their feet as their co-workers free sections of metal weighing hundreds of pounds. These sections are tossed overboard, falling dozens of feet before striking the sand. Worker on the ground will drag the pieces away from the ship toward waiting trucks. Everything aboard, including refrigerators, computers, furniture, and even windows, is sold to local merchants who peddle them to homeowners in Bangladesh. Generally, these men know nothing about the ship in life — what it carried, how it was built, what it still contains. These factors come together to create a dangerous workplace that regularly takes the limbs and lives of shipbreakers.

January's measure was meant to abate some of this danger by requiring that all ships be inspected and certified "safe" before being rammed on the beach for waiting shipbreaking crews. This might have prevented exposure to toxic chemical and hazardous environments. The effect this law had on local shipbreaking activity and the price of iron was too much for the Bangladeshi government to ignore. The local shipbreaker's association defended the government's move, saying "This is a very good decision for the interest of the country. Now it will be easier for us to move forward."

Local environmentalists had something else to say. "We are against this decision since toxic ships will come to Bangladesh posing a serious threat to the people," environmentalist Abu Naser Khan said to the Associated Press. Though the hazards of shipbreaking are limited to developing nations, the practice is one of the most visible ways that global consumerism victimizes the people of poor and developing countries. The citizens of Bangladesh are well aware of the extreme hazards associated with breaking down the ships once used to freight goods to and from industrialized nations. They choose to participate in shipbreaking anyway because nothing else pays even half as well.