COPHEN HAGEN: 11 Danish shipping companies and subsidiaries have sent 18 ships to be scrapped at the notorious scrap yards in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh over the past four years, according to ship scrapping watch dog website offthebeach.org here the other day.
The ships are being scrapped by impoverished migrant workers in dangerous conditions for pay as little as 2.5 kroner an hour, at ship breaking yards such as in Alang, India, where at least 470 fatal accidents have occurred since 1983, according to the Brussels-based NGO Shipbreaking Platform.
”The shipyards down there, including those can call themselves ’environmental’, are miles from the standards seen at facilities such as in Denmark,” Patrizia Heidegger, the head of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, told Customs Today.
“The workers’ security equipment is not in order and there are often accidents where they are crushed by bits of iron falling from the ships, killed in explosions and many become ill after being exposed to toxic substances like asbestos and mercury.”
Since 2006 it has been forbidden to sail ships under Danish flags to the ship yards in India, but the Danish companies own many ships that are not registered in Denmark.
The Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, which was drafted back in 2009 and will toughen the regulation of ship recycling, has yet to be ratified, and so far only Norway has signed on.
And it is unlikely that the new more stringent EU rules which are going into effect in a few years will have much of an effect as few European shipping companies register their ships in EU nations.
