Environmental lobby groups have issued a joint statement claiming that the recently ratified International Maritime Organization recycling convention will “fail to ensure sustainable ship recycling”.
The comments come after Bangladesh and Liberia recently acceded to the Hong Kong Convention for Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (HKC), bringing it into force by 2025.
The ratification has been welcomed across the shipping industry as the first global regulation for ship recycling.
But, in a statement, a number of environmental groups said the HKC will not go far enough in raising standards at shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh which have both ratified the convention.
“This international convention rubberstamps shipbreaking on tidal mudflats and ignores labour rights and international rules for hazardous waste management,” said Ingvild Jenssen, director of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform.
“It will only serve the interests of shipping companies to avoid paying the true cost of sustainable and ethical recycling and undercut efforts to level the playing field for responsible ship recyclers to compete,” she said.
The environmentalists said the regulation will not prevent the dumping of hazardous waste from OECD countries to non-OECD countries in the same way as the Basel Convention currently does.
They also pointed out that all the Indian shipbreakers, which are certified as meeting the standard of the HKC, have failed to be approved by the European Union’s Ship Recycling Regulation (SRR).
Rizwana Hasan, director of the Bangladesh Environmental Law Association, said she would be calling for changes to the HKC to achieve higher standards of environmental justice and labour rights.
Another flaw in the regulation which the NGO Platform pointed out is that enforcement of the HKC will be with the flag states.
End-of-life ships are usually re-registered under flags with poor compliance records which are unlikely to monitor compliance.
“It is imperative for the global community to recognise and address the loopholes that hamper the HKC, and assert the letter and intent of the Basel Convention which was to prevent the Global South from being the dumping ground of the rich and powerful industries and nations,” said Jim Puckett, director of the Basel Action Network.
