The Ship-Breakers

At low tide ship-breakers haul a 10,000-pound cable to a beached ship to winch pieces ashore as they dismantle it. (from article)

Ship-breaking...such a simple term but one that is impossibly complex.

As the National Geographic article with the simple title tells us...

Oceangoing vessels are not meant to be taken apart. They’re designed to withstand extreme forces in some of the planet’s most difficult environments, and they’re often constructed with toxic materials, such as asbestos and lead. When ships are scrapped in the developed world, the process is more strictly regulated and expensive, so the bulk of the world’s shipbreaking is done in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where labor is cheap and oversight is minimal.

The process might be better titled as ship-recycling because that's what's happening with the ships, "Whatever the actual profits, they are realized by doggedly recycling more than 90 percent of each ship. ... Everything is removed and sold to salvage dealers—from enormous engines, batteries, generators, and miles of copper wiring to the crew bunks, portholes, lifeboats, and electronic dials on the bridge."

Steel from ship hulls is harvested in plates. Each can weigh a thousand pounds or more. Using brute strength and improvised rollers, teams of carriers move the plates to trucks, which transport them to mills where they are converted into steel rods for construction.

Only the problem is that the other 10%, the unrecyclable 10% is poisoning the water, the beaches, and the workers along the way to recovering the 90%.

Carriers spend their days slathered in mud contaminated with heavy metals and toxic paint particles that leach from the ships into the tidal flats.

How do we continue with this?

Is the recovery of the 90% worth the cost in environmental damages and lives shortened or lost?