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VICE made a nice video on the shipbreaking here a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU0DXdAhdsA
That is wild. Could not believe how many people were wearing sandals or completely barefoot.
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Is it an inherently dangerous job or is it dangerous because of how it is managed?
Both. With western automation, rules and PPE it would be no worse than building the things in the first place
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> Well, West should stop dumping their garbage to the rest of the world. Actually the export of ships to be wrecked in Asia already is banned under EU law and international treaties - and sometimes, even company owners can and do land in jail for violating them, as it happened to Georg Eide [1]. The difficulty lies in the fact that many ships aren't registered in the EU countries, but in small countries like Antigua…
We could require that ships they dock in EU harbours are owned by countries that are party to some international anti-ship breaking agreement. But it's a lot of paperwork :)
And I'm not sure how to effectively police that.
If anyone is interested in a game themed shipbreaking/dismantling things, check out Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Instead of oceanic ships one gets to take apart spaceships and sort the salvages like garbage-recycle-compost. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1161580/Hardspace_Shipbre...
I wanted to love that game. I gave it a good go, but just could not bring myself to want to play it. I think the story and narrative just put me right off of it from the very outset for some reason. I don't know why but it was a total turn-off. Also the zero-G thing made sense from a setting-perspective, but the slowly-slowly-drifting-around with limited control was just frustrating and infuriating in equal measure.…
From the Steam page, this is how the game publisher describes the game:
> We offer you the privilege of helping turn humanity’s past into its future by salvaging ships in zero-g. Each one is a puzzle, and how you solve it is up to you! Carve your way in, salvage everything, and maximize your profit.
Seems relatively vanilla, besides the capitalism part but most people are relatively accepting of that edge nowadays I feel like.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel “Ship Breaker” deserves a mention here. It’s set in Paolo’s dystopian solarpunk universe, where old tankers are cut up to extract the last tons of fossil fuels from their hold, and it really emphasises how dangerous and unrewarding of a job it is.
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We could require that ships they dock in EU harbours are owned by countries that are party to some international anti-ship breaking agreement. But it's a lot of paperwork :)
Still would not prevent just selling the LLC at the end of the ship's useful life. And I'm not sure how to effectively police that.
These are probably taken at the Alang (India) and Chittagong (Bangladesh) Ship Breaking Yards, where they run the ships aground at high tide. Both visible on Google Maps satelite view: https://www.google.com/maps/place/21%C2%B023'21.9%22N+72%C2%... https://www.google.com/maps/place/22%C2%B027'24.5%22N+91%C2%...
I'm not in a position to look right now, but I'm pretty sure there's video of this happening out on YouTube. It's pretty fearsome seeing these big vessels coming in under power and crashing into the shore. Tons of inertia.
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The maritime industry, more than "the West", is a prime culprit there. Let's also mention how they skirt taxation, the use of flags of convenience, the lack of protection for crews, the matrioshka shell companies...
Also the clothes industry! The clothes brands claim to recycle cotton, but use 3rd party "recycling companies" to ship the textiles to Africa, where they just burn it in huge waste heaps. With huge environmental issues. https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blog/54589/how-fast-fas... Computer "recycling" in Lagos/Nigeria is another topic.
Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet added a airtags in clothes "recycled" by H&M. Guess where they ended up?
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/jlME1e/aftonbladet-inve...
The most intriguing part to me was the wooden cabinet was painted white with something stencil printed in green. My best guess was that was a Cyrillic script, and about twenty five years back, it wasn't easy to decipher what they meant.
Those cabinets are still hanging in our old house. Next time I'm there, all I need to do is pull up my phone and translate that text and get a kick out of what the original intention was for the sailors and what my mom is storing in it!
I feel like the music marries well with the somewhat depressingly industrial hardcore work on display in the ship-breaking clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVm8G0ipETc (El Rodeo by Kyuss)