By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 8 2004 (IPS)

Hundreds of derelict “ghost ships” sent for scrapping in India, Bangladesh, Turkey and a handful of other nations each year can now be considered toxic waste under international law, an essential step toward ending the dangerous trade.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace described October’s decision by the parties to the Basel Convention on curbing the movement of toxic wastes as an important victory.

“This is a major step towards ensuring that the people and the environments of the world’s ship breaking countries no longer have to bear the burden of the shipping industry’s toxic trash,” said Marietta Harjono of Greenpeace International in a statement.

Thousands of old, unwanted commercial and military vessels, “ghost” ships, sit rusting in harbours the world over. Those that are sold for their scrap metal are nearly always sent for ship breaking in southern nations because dismantling ships is very labour intensive.

Hundreds of these ships are run aground on the beaches of Bangladesh and India, where swarms of labourers known as ship breakers cut them into pieces to recover the valuable steel. Turkey, China and Pakistan are other leading ship breaking nations.

The old ships nearly always contain toxic PCBs, asbestos, mercury, lead, waste fuel oils, and other dangerous substances. Much of this material is part of the ship itself, contained in electrical and mechanical equipment or insulation. It can also be present in the ship’s holds or ballast tanks.

“It’s hard, dangerous work, where one worker is killed every day in the breaking yards of India and Bangladesh,” said Mike Townsley, a spokesperson for Greenpeace International, in an interview.

The toxic materials are not disposed of properly, creating an enormous environmental problem that affects the health of the people living near ship breaking areas, he added.

For these reasons, shipyards in North America and Europe will not touch most of these old ships, Townsley said.

“Defining these ships as waste is a groundbreaking decision,” said Richard Gutierrez of the Basel Action Network (BAN), an international environmental organisation based in Seattle.

Ratified in 1992, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal banned the export of hazardous wastes, including materials for recycling, from developed to developing countries in 1995. Currently 163 nations have ratified the treaty. The United States has not.

Under the proposed rules, nations must prohibit any exports of ships that do not have the consent of recipient countries, and must assure that ship breaking is performed in an environmentally sound manner and to minimise the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes.

That places the onus on ship owners in the North to clean out the toxins before sending ships for breaking, Gutierrez told IPS.

Many in the shipping industry, along with the United States and Japan, opposed the Basel Convention’s involvement in the issue, hoping instead that the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) would assume total control over “end-of-life” ships and impose far less rigorous standards, he added.

The United States has a significant inventory of retired ships, including at least 125 obsolete military vessels in its “ghost fleet.”

“The U.S. government fought this decision all the way,” said Townsley of Greenpeace.

Enforcement will be difficult, he acknowledges. The common practice of “re-flagging,” changing a ship’s country of registry, and convoluted administrative records make it hard to determine ship ownership.

A spokesperson for the Basel Convention in Geneva told IPS that Greenpeace is overstating the significance of the decision that members reached, and forwarded a statement from the Secretariat of the Basel Convention.

“These developments represent important steps taken towards the future establishment of a global legal regime governing ship dismantling,” it said.

However, the members “did not adopt a legally binding decision requiring the 163 parties to the Basel Convention to control the export of ships under the terms of the convention and to prohibit exports without the consent of recipient countries.”

The countries did agree to continue to work with organisations like the IMO, a United Nations agency, to prevent pollution of the oceans, and with ship owners to develop legally binding solutions for proper ship dismantling by the convention’s next conference of the parties meeting in November 2006.

What is clear is that ship-breaking countries like India and Turkey do not want contaminated ships because they have no safe way to dispose of the toxins, said Townsley. “They need financial assistance to build dry docks with containment barriers,” he suggested.

There is some urgency to “green” ship breaking – 2,200 single-hull oil tankers are due to be scrapped worldwide over the next few years.

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