Shipbreaker
A contractor who breaks up old ships for scrap.
‘It was towed up the River Thames from Sheerness in Kent to a ship-breaker’s yard in Rotherhithe, South London.’
Oxford Dictionary
1 Echoes of Ship Breaking
17 jul. 2014
He is one of the 66,000 workers who work on the ship breaking yards at Alang in Gujarat and Darukhana in Mumbai. They migrate from UP, Orissa, Bihar and various other states across India in search of employment and better life. The job of these workers is to strip the raw materials from these ships and sell them to various integral industries i.e. construction, steel mills, to name a few.
The ship breaking industry as always been surrounded with myths and controversies. With many reports in the media mostly giving it a broad tag of “hazardous to environment” which is far from the truth, what ship-breaking actually does is reuse valuable raw materials striped from a dead ship, which would end up being more hazardous if left in the sea.
The primary pressing issue of ship breaking which gets skirted is its workers. The process of ship-breaking requires workers from the start to the end. Often to skirt costs; untrained contractual workers will be hired, safety equipment will be ignored and benefits will be skimmed.
In this documentary ‘Echoes of Ship-Breaking’ we’ll be entering through the backdoor of the ship-breaking industry to see:
• How the industry processes labour and ships
• How ships are brought in and labourers are hired, and how it starts
• The industry’s questionable history regarding worker laws
• Why and how ship breaking reached India
• How ship breaking affects the environment
• Breaking down the process of ship-breaking in India
• Its contribution to India and the future of ship breaking in India
2 The Ship Breakers
3 The Ship Breakers of Bangladesh: VICE INTL
9 feb. 2015
4 Ship Breakers | Bangladesh
16 jul. 2013
Broadcast: 17 February 2013 on Sunday Night, Seven Network, Australia.
It’s one of the most jaw-dropping sights of the modern world. For as far as the eye can see, along a stretch of coastline in Bangladesh, hundreds of mammoth supertankers lie beached on the sand. This is where the world’s ships come to die. Tim joins the thousands of workers, some of them children, who are paid just 47 cents a day to break up these rusting giants with their bare hands.
AWARDS:
Winner: Walkley Award for Camerawork, Australia (2013)
CREW:
Reporter / Camera: Tim Noonan
Producer: Ali Russell
Sound: Dan Abbott
Editor: Jimmy Hamilton
13 jun. 2015
17 jul. 2014
The bothering heat and shouts of his Mukadam mingles with the echoes of machine and men usually 30 to 70 feet below him. He has to silence it all when he turns on his blow torch and focuses solely on weakening the structure of the very ship he stands on; right now he is working on the metal holdings around the mast. He stands away cautiously as the weakened mast is hooked on to a whinge and it’s pulled down. The bulking mast hits the bottom of the hull, the boom reaches his ears and touches his skin, it reminds him a little bit of his village, of his childhood, when he would drop a metal bucket in well to collect water. With no time for nostalgia he gets back to cutting another part of the hull, he does this every day for 8-10 hours; his safety net is his experience.
He is one of the 66,000 workers who work on the ship breaking yards at Alang in Gujarat and Darukhana in Mumbai. They migrate from UP, Orissa, Bihar and various other states across India in search of employment and better life. The job of these workers is to strip the raw materials from these ships and sell them to various integral industries i.e. construction, steel mills, to name a few.
The ship breaking industry as always been surrounded with myths and controversies. With many reports in the media mostly giving it a broad tag of “hazardous to environment” which is far from the truth, what ship-breaking actually does is reuse valuable raw materials striped from a dead ship, which would end up being more hazardous if left in the sea.
The primary pressing issue of ship breaking which gets skirted is its workers. The process of ship-breaking requires workers from the start to the end. Often to skirt costs; untrained contractual workers will be hired, safety equipment will be ignored and benefits will be skimmed.
In this documentary ‘Echoes of Ship-Breaking’ we’ll be entering through the backdoor of the ship-breaking industry to see:
• How the industry processes labour and ships
• How ships are brought in and labourers are hired, and how it starts
• The industry’s questionable history regarding worker laws
• Why and how ship breaking reached India
• How ship breaking affects the environment
• Breaking down the process of ship-breaking in India
• Its contribution to India and the future of ship breaking in India
13 mrt. 2015
4 jan. 2018
24 jan. 2013
27 jun. 2019
5 sep. 2016
16 apr. 2014
11 dec. 2015
17 feb. 2018
21 aug. 2020
Today we’re going to take a look at ship recycling. It may surprise you to learn that most of history’s passenger ships have ended their days at the hand of the cutters torch – including many of the most famous ships that ever set sail.
Ships have ended their days at scrap yards for about as long as ships have been around. Scrapping a ship can be a dangerous activity that requires skill and experience to be carried out successfully.
It allows materials such as steel, aluminium, glass and the like, to be extracted, reused and repurposed. This has led to terms like “it’s been turned into razor blades” becoming common slang for the fate of a ship heading to scrap.
For the most part, ships are withdrawn from service as newer vessels come online to replace them. This is a gradual process – with some ships being retained longer than others due to high demand, or delays in the construction of their replacements.
Most ships that have existed have ended their days in a scrapyard. This includes some of the most famous passenger liners of all time.
While scrap is a common fate for most ships, in recent years cruise ships have been kept in service for longer and longer – thanks to the unprecedented global cruising boom experienced over the past few decades.
This isn’t to say cruise ships haven’t been broken up during this time, with older vessels such as SS Norway – the former Pacific Princess “Love Boat” and the former P&O Pacific Sky all being scrapped over the last two decades.
Costa Victoria, Carnival Fantasy, Carnival Inspiration and Pullmantur’s Sovereign and Monarch have all been sold for scrap in recent months, with the latter four vessels all heading to the same Turkish scrapyard.
It might surprise you though that the majority of the things on board the ship, such as dining tables and chairs, beds, lighting and carpets are left aboard and either on-sold or recycled by the scrap yard.
While ships like Canberra, Big Red Boat II, Carnival Fantasy, Carnival Inspiration, Sovereign and Monarch sailed to scrap wearing their original name and livery, in some cases ships bound for the scrap yard may be renamed and de-branded before their final voyage.
For example, the SS Norway was renamed Blue Lady before she made her final journey to Alang. Norwegian Cruise Line branding was removed from the ship in advance of her final voyage.
While the media attention has been grabbed with dramatic footage of cruise ships being driven up onto the beach under their own power – this is not always the case. Norway, for example, was taken under tow owing to her engines being unserviceable after an on board explosion – which was actually the cause of her exit from service.
More recently this was seen with the Costa Concordia. Having been partially re-floated, the ship was towed to Genoa in Italy where she was dismantled.
Some ships are harder to scrap than others, which can make the process very drawn out, as was the case with the Canberra. Some yards will commence the process with a ceremonial ‘cutting off the bow’, which we’ve seen occur on the Monarch in Turkey.
My thanks to:
Peter Knego / http://midshipcentury.com for remarkable video footage used in this video of the ships being scrapped at Alang. Peter has videos including “The Sands of Alang” which you can check out: https://midshipcentury.com/
Andrew Sassoi-Walker https://www.solentphotographer.com/ – Andrew is without doubt one of the finest photographer of cruise ships and aircraft!
Rob Henderson & Doug Cremer for access to the Henderson & Cremer Collection.
J. Frame & Vicki Cross for photographs.
17 The Dark side of the Shipping Industry – Ship Breakers
17 apr. 2013
18 Supertanker FRONT DRIVER beaching itself at Gadani Pakistan.
Shipping’s Dirty Secret
File on 4
The shipping industry is worth millions to the British economy and we depend on it for most of our goods. File on 4 lifts the lid on the dangerous and polluting world of shipbreaking and investigates why ships once owned by UK companies end their lives on beaches in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Editor, Maggie Latham
Producer, Jim Booth
Reporter, Kate West
Ship scrappage and global trade
Business Daily
We examine some of the less glamorous minutiae of global trade – like where old ships go to die, and who clears up the mess afterwards. We have a report from the ship-wrecking yards of Bangladesh.
And we shine a light on that little square thing they place under heavy crates of stuff to lift them on and off lorries. Could the humble pallet in fact be the single most important object in the global economy? Marshall White, director of the Pallet & Container Research Laboratory at Virginia Tech University, thinks it might be.
Plus the scourge of the license. The USA may have a reputation as the champion of unregulated commerce, but some 30% of its workforce require specialist licenses to work their trade, and our regular commentator Steve Fritzinger argues that such restrictions, put there in the name of consumer-protection, often border on the ridiculous.
(Image: A ship-breaking yard in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Credit: FARJANA K. GODHULY/AFP/Getty Images)
12 okt. 2016