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Shipbreaking

edwardburtynsky.com

121–130 of 202 posts

Re: Shipbreaking

#121
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a lot of work to prevent India from breaking ships it wants to break.

Meaningless statement. You can say the exact same thing about any law.

Not every law tries to regulate the behavior of people in other jurisdictions.

Re: Shipbreaking

#122

Glad to see many comments recognize what a bad thing this is. The photographer is sadly insouciant of how many poor people it kills and the terrible ecosystem damage it creates. Read more about it at https://shipbreakingplatform.org/

My understanding is that any recycling advantage is dwarfed by the environmental impact of the ship breaking process.

Re: Shipbreaking

#123
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A follow up 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...

I’m a bit confused as to how this investigation worked - how can they tell if clothes were ground for fiber with just airtags?

TL;DR

1. They travelled to the location (in Togo).

2. They found the guy who imported the jeans. He was about to try to resell them (along with huge bales of clothes), but most of the clothes are not sold. I dont think recycling was at the top of his mind.

3. The last signal was from a place where they use to make a fire of the clothes.

4. Most of the garments travel around the world as waste - not exactly good for the environment.

The person from H&M responded with whataboutisms. Which is not exactly legit since they use this in marketing.

Edit:formatting

Re: Shipbreaking

#124
post #39

One of my previous (job) tasks was to monitor larger vessels, and analyze where they'd end up getting torn apart. Turns out western shipping companies don't like paying western prices for that kind of work, and try to sneak the vessels down to India, Bangladesh, etc. where that kind of work is much cheaper. But with cheaper prices comes a host of issues, from the environmental effects, to human workers actually perfo…

The trajectory of the last French air carriers - the Foch and the Clémenceau - is a good illustration of the mess it can be, even for former military flagships. Those military ships are of course full of asbestos - more than usual - and heavy metals. The Clémenceau was supposed to be dismantled in Spain, but when the marine nationale saw it being towed to Turkey, they cancelled the contract and got it back. Then anot…

I wonder how different each of the wikipedias are between languages. There's barely any info about the dismantling of the Clémenceau in the English wikipedia. I occasionally read the Spanish language wikipedia for South American history as it is more complete. As a someone fluent in both languages I feel like I have access to more knowledge.

How much knowledge is "hidden" in other languages on Wikipedia?

Would be cool for translators to copy portions between languages. They must do this already, right?

Re: Shipbreaking

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

What in particular turned you off, the capitalistic nature of the story? 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 capitali…

It wastes a fair amount of your time blabbing on about this cartoonishly evil company, but that evil company has no real effect on the gameplay, so it's just distracting and irritating. And it's not some sly or evocative social commentary; it's ham-fisted and over-the-top. It almost feels like listening to the caricatured horribleness of this company is an extra price you have to pay to play the underlying game.

The gameplay itself is just great though.

Re: Shipbreaking

#127
My wife and I visited the shipbreaking yards near Chittagong on our honeymoon. It was remarkable. I make field recordings; I was able to do a fair amount of field recording before a nervous foreman invited us to tea, gave us a calendar from the shipbreakers' association, and politely escorted us off the property. Apparently there had been journalists by in months prior doing some investigative journalism into issues of various kinds and while it was pretty clear we were not that, it wasn't worth his job to be wrong. Could not argue. Before we got booted some more junior and affable guys invited us to come through the former hold of a half-dismantled oil tanker and then up on to the fragment of deck remaining and the control tower. Amazing to be where thousands of tons of oil had been in living memory.

The specialization of labor and application of manual force to an industrial process on that scale was mesmerizing, but as you can tell from the photographs, was unsafe in innumerable ways.

Always wanted to visit the ones in Gujarat as well.

Re: Shipbreaking

#128
post #126

I went to my hometown in Pakistan a couple years ago and made my way to one of these yards and recorded this. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/C8VZfLzWYTc?si=0bXNEQDlqj6J4bKn

Amazing footage. I very much enjoyed! I will share this with my kids as well.

Re: Shipbreaking

#129
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually strange - GP is just using that word to emotionally manipulate readers.

To manipulate readers into realizing that industry doesn't pay their workers well?

basically. To manipulating the reader into thinking that workers being paid well or according to their "benefit" is the natural, logistical, or otherwise expected outcome.

It is an attempt to switch the roles between what the conventional, familiar, and safe what is unconventional, weird, and strange.

Paying workers according to "benefit" is not tried and true. It has real challenges and problems.

Re: Shipbreaking

#130
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only imagine the conditions his "workers" worked in back then given how poor the conditions still are today. I think scenes from ship breaking, electronics recycling, and other recycling efforts sent overseas could fit in, as-is, to a film like Blade Runner.

Those industries don't pay well to anyone involved but are a global benefit. Such a strange world we live in.

"Paying well" is relative. There are lots of industries that are rightly considered exploitative from the western eye, but people who are working these jobs would otherwise be starving or relying on meager government handouts if they went away.
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