The ghost ship nobody wants

Imagine you’re the State of France. What do you do with a 27,000-ton warship full of asbestos, PCBs, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals, which you don’t want and no European country is willing or able to scrap for you? Why, you send it off to India to be broken up by hand in a scrapyard where impoverished workers are injured and die every day.

In most shipbreaking nations proper waste management is absent. And when it comes to India waste management is absolutely forgotten. There are no rules and regulations.  And where rules exist, they’re unlikely to be enforced.

Barely equipped workers dismantle the carcasses of ships by hand.  They haul disemboweled cables out to burn them on the beach. They use blowtorches to cut through pipes containing oil and gas that often explode in their faces. Steel plates and pieces fall off the ships. And they are exposed to deadly toxins 24 hours a day.  Lost limbs and burns are commonplace. One out of four workers in Alang is expected to contract cancer due to workplace poisons, making the industry amongst the most deadly in the world.

Thank heavens Supreme court of India intervened and prevented the entry of the ghost ship.

Courtesy: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/ghost-ship-121205