A Dirty Job

A 2007 episode of 60 Minutes reported a story of how American ships are decommissioned and dismantled by going to Bangladesh and shoring up, permanently.

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries on Earth.

The problem is that tearing these ships apart wreaks environmental havoc. The toxins and wastes infest the waterways and shorelines, which are populated by millions of people.

The 60 Minutes video can be viewed here.

Countries like Bangladesh are more favoured destinations because the labour is so cheap, and there are virtually no environmental regulations.

60 Minutes states,

The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks – pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.

And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.

Roland Buerk, author of Breaking Ships, said,

It is the west’s garbage dump… It would be [more expensive] because in Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks.

So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they’d have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here.

Polluters Evading Paying

Displacing environmental responsibilities in this manner could be perceived as an attempt to circumvent the Polluter Pays Principle, adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Community (EC)

Also known as the Extended Polluter Responsibility (EPR), it seeks to shift responsibility on the entities producing the pollution, and not the regional governments situated there. OECD defines EPR as,

a concept where manufacturers and importers of products should bear a significant degree of responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products throughout the product life-cycle, including upstream impacts inherent in the selection of materials for the products, impacts from manufacturers’ production process itself, and downstream impacts from the use and disposal of the products. Producers accept their responsibility when designing their products to minimise life-cycle environmental impacts, and when accepting legal, physical or socio-economic responsibility for environmental impacts that cannot be eliminated by design

EPR was first established in 1990 by Thomas Lindhqvist in a report to the Swedish Ministry of the Environment. Elements of EPR outlined in the report include:

Liability: refers to a responsibility for proven environmental damages caused by the product in question. The extend of the liability is determined by legislation and may embrace different parts of the life-cycle of the product, including usage and final disposal.

Economic responsibility: means the producer will cover all or part of the costs for collection, recycling, or final disposal of the product manufactured. These costs could be paid directly by the producer or by a special fee.

Physical responsibility: is used to characterize the systems where the manufacturer is involved in the actual physical management of the products or the effects of the products.

Informative responsibility: signifies several different possibilities to extend responsibility for the products by requiring producers to supply information on the environmental properties of the products manufactured.

Product Stewardship means that all parties – designers, suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, consumers, recyclers, and disposers – involved in producing, selling, or using a product take responsibility for the full environmental and economic impacts of that product.

Resources

Thomas Lindhqvist & Karl Lidgren, “Modeller för förlängt producentansvar” (“Models for Extended Producer Responsibility,” in Swedish), 26 October 1990, published by the Ministry of the Environment in “FrÃ¥n vaggan till graven — sex studier av varors miljöpÃ¥verken” (“From the Cradle to the Grave — six studies of the environmental impact of products,” in Swedish), DC 1991:0.