The
ghost ship nobody wants 12/12/2005
- Toulon, France — Imagine you're the State of France.
What do you do with a 27,000-ton warship full of asbestos,
PCBs, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals, which
you don't want and no European country is willing or able
to scrap for you? Why, you send it off to India to be
broken up by hand in a scrapyard where impoverished workers
are injured and die every day.
Not if we have anything to say about it.
This morning, climbers scaled the
mast of the French aircraft carrier "Clemenceau,"
unfurling a banner reading "Asbestos Carrier Stay
Out of India." Another activists buzzed the deck
of the carrier with a motorized paraglider and a banner
reading "Not here. Not Anywhere." It's part
of a day of action in Bangladesh, Geneva, and France aimed
at demanding immediate reforms of one of the world's most
dangerous and dirty industries.
Clemenceau: the ship nobody wants
Greenpeace has been watching the fate
of the site of today's action, the French aircraft carrier
Clemenceau, since 1997, when it was decommissioned. Back
then, plans were to simply scuttle it in the Mediterranean
as an "artificial reef" -- albeit a highly toxic
one. Since that time, the French government and the ship's
various subsequent 'caretaker' owners have been trying
to figure out a way to get rid of it, ideally stripping
the ship of its dangerous asbestos and other toxics while
retaining the salvage value of its 22,000 tons of steel.
Years of attempts to get another European
country to take the ship have failed. And removing the
asbestos responsibly, in France, is simply too costly
a prospect for somebody holding onto a glorified piece
of floating garbage which they've bought in the hopes
of making a quick buck.
That's when the Indian scrapyard of
Alang begins to look like a dream come true for somebody
who wants to send their problems away to a place where
environmental regulations are lax and workers' rights
are practically nonexistant. The French courts have cleared
the path for the ship to be exported to India by saying
its fate is a "military matter" and thus claiming
they have no jurisdiction for keeping the ship in France.
There's just two little problems:
Greenpeace, and international law.
Shipbreaking in Asia
The Clemenceau may be one of the largest
ships to be sent for scrap but every year a vast decrepit
armada bearing a dangerous cargo of toxic substances,
asbestos, PCBs and heavy metals, ends up in ship breaking
yards in Bangladesh, India, China and Pakistan, where
they are cut up in the crudest of fashions, taking a huge
toll on human health and the local environment. Half of
the world's ocean-going ships end their sailing lives
in India. Most of these vessels land on the shipbreaking
beaches of Alang (Bhavnagar district, Gujarat) on the
country's west coast.
In most shipbreaking nations proper
waste management is absent. There are no rules and regulations.
And where rules exist, they're unlikely to be enforced.
Barely equipped workers dismantle
the carcasses of ships by hand. They haul disemboweled
cables out to burn them on the beach. They use blowtorches
to cut through pipes containing oil and gas that often
explode in their faces. Steel plates and pieces fall off
the ships. And they are exposed to deadly toxins 24 hours
a day. Lost limbs and burns are commonplace. One out of
four workers in Alang is expected to contract cancer due
to workplace poisons, making the industry amongst the
most deadly in the world.
Why then do labourers come to Alang?
Ask Sashi Sethi, the widow of Surendra
Sethi, eking out a meager living in Khaling village in
Orissa. After her husband died in Alang, she warns other
young men not to go. But they tell her in response, "If
we go to Alang only one man dies, but if we don't five
will die."
We say it's garbage
The Basel Convention is an international
treaty which prohibits the export of hazardous waste from
rich to poor countries. We worked hard many years ago
to see this treaty implemented as a way of ending the
terrible practice of using non-OECD countries as cheap
dumping grounds for dangerous wastes which are expensive
to treat properly in the OECD countries where they originated.
The International Maritime Organisation
(IMO) claims the regulations of the Basel convention don't
apply to ships like the Clemenceau. It's still a ship,
goes their reasoning, as long as it floats, and it isn't
waste until it arrives. If the toxic wastes embedded in
their structure were removed, placed in a barrel and then
put back on the ship, then it would definitely be illegal.
Today, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, representatives
of three United Nations bodies will begin a three day
meeting to discuss ways to bring the ship breaking industry
under control. The IMO has resisted any attempt to loosen
its grip on all ship-related regulation and bring the
industry under the purview of Basel. As a concession earlier
this month, the IMO announced plans to develop a new treaty
for ship scrapping. However, it will not come into effect
for at least another five years and is likely to place
the burden of responsibility on the breaking yards and
not the ship owners.
"Not all of the casualties of
this toxic trade are unknown," said Marietta Honjoro
of Greenpeace International. Together with the International
Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Greenpeace visited
the working and living places of ship breakers in India
and Bangladesh, to witness first-hand the story of this
human and environmental tragedy.
Their report follows the story of
110 workers who have died during accidents in ship breaking
yards of India and Bangladesh. "The stories in the
report represent only they tip of the deadly iceberg,
there is no record of those who died of long term diseases
related to toxic exposure," said Honjoro.
What we want
"While the talking continues
so does the dying," said Honjoro. "This week's
discussion must conclude, at a minimum, that until the
IMO provides new regulations for ship scrapping, the industry
should adhere to the Basel convention and international
human rights conventions." End of life ships should
be treated like any other toxic material under the internationally
recognised Basel Convention which bans the dumping of
such waste by OECD countries in non-OECD countries. |