Evergreen Marine has signed up to the Ship Recycling Transparency Initiative (SRTI).
The leading boxship owner and operator — the key company under the umbrella of Taiwan's Evergreen Line — has joined 11 shipowners that are promising full disclosure on shiprecycling.
The Taipei-based company's adherence to the scheme is seen as a bid to improve its ship-scrapping image after problems with the sale of some of its older containerships.
Those problems reached a head in December last year when an Evergreen vessel originally destined for green recycling in India ended up being sold by cash buyers to Bangladesh, where it fetched a higher price.
The SRTI initiative will see Evergreen share shiprecycling information via an online platform in a bid to help the industry improve its eco-friendly recycling policies and practices.
“We are committed to the planning of a completely sustainable life cycle for our vessels from design, construction, operation and ultimately to decommissioning," the company said in a statement.
Adverse publicity
Evergreen is one of several companies that incurred adverse publicity in 2018 over non-green scrapping.
In January 2018, Norway's Oil Fund, whose official name is the Government Pension Fund Global, said it would not invest in Evergreen, Korea Line Corp, Precious Shipping and Thoresen Thai Agencies because of their demolition policies.
That is believed to have led the Taiwan-based company to tighten its green-scrapping requirements.
But the shipowner's problems mounted last December, when a containership sold for demolition under the owner's new policy of only using green scrapping in India had instead ended up in Chattogram, Bangladesh.
Evergreen subsequently threatened to take legal action against the cash buyer of the 5,364-teu Ever Unison (built 1996).
The vessel was sold to Chattogram for an estimated $600,000 more than it would have brought in if the vessel was scrapped in India at a "green" facility in compliance with the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships.
26 members
Evergreen is one of 26 signatories to the SRTI and the fifth to have joined the scheme this year.
“We believe transparency is a key driver of change in the shiprecycling value chain,” said Andrew Stephens, executive director of the Sustainable Shipping Initiative that hosts the SRTI.
“We welcome Evergreen Marine to the growing SRTI family that includes like-minded shipowners who are holding themselves to account before key stakeholders, including clients, investors, and the wider public.”
