CHITTAGONG (Bangladesh), June 19 — Mizan Hossain fell 10 metres from the top of a ship he was cutting up on Chittagong beach in Bangladesh — where the majority of the world’s...
This shop in Taman OUG serves the unlikely pairing of ‘tonkotsu shoyu ramen’ and pour over coffee — and somehow it works!This aerial photograph taken on February 17, 2025 shows a general view of a shipbreaking yard in Bangladesh 's southern port city of Chittagong. The shipbreaking industry employs 20,000 to 30,000 people directly or indirectly in sprawling port on the Bay of Bengal. But the human and environmental cost is immense, experts say.
Hossain has been cutting up ships on the sand without proper protection or insurance since he was a child, like many men in his village a few kilometres inland from the giant beached ships. But many question whether its rules on handling toxic waste and protecting workers are sufficient or if they will ever be properly implemented.
Chittagong’s 25-kilometre stretch of beach is the world’s biggest ship graveyard. Giant hulks of oil tankers or gas carriers lie in the mud under the scorching sun, an army of workers slowly dismembering them with oxyacetylene torches. There have been improvements in recent years, he said, especially after Dhaka ratified the Hong Kong Convention in 2023, Sahin said.The industry is further accused of causing major environmental damage, particularly to mangroves, with oil and heavy metals escaping into the sea from the beach. Asbestos — which is not illegal in Bangladesh — is also dumped in open-air landfills.
“Just because we’re South Asian, with dark skin, are we not capable of excelling in a field?” he told AFP. With the sector in crisis, with half as many ships sent for scrap since the pandemic — and Bangladesh hit by instability after the tumultuous ousting of premier Sheikh Hasina in August — investors are reluctant, said John Alonso of the International Maritime Organisation .PHP encases the asbestos it extracts in cement and stores it on-site in a dedicated room. “I think we have about six to seven years of storage capacity,” said its expert Liton Mamudzer.
Shipbreaking Platform said it was symptomatic of a lack of adequate “regulation, supervision and worker protections” in Bangladesh, even with the Hong Kong rules. At the Belgian shipbreaking yard Galloo near the Ghent-Terneuzen canal, demolition chief Peter Wyntin told AFP how ships are broken down into “50 different kinds of materials” to be recycled.
While shipbreakers in the EU have “25,000 pages of legislation to comply with”, he argued, those in Aliaga on the western coast of Turkiye have only 25 pages of rules to respect to be “third-country compliant under SRR”.
Recycling Bangladesh Ship Recycling Industry
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