Scrapping over ship recycling

SHIP scrapping, or "recycling" as it has come to be more politely called over the past couple of decades, is a hot topic right now.

In a nutshell, there is an international agreement on environmental standards and certification for ship demolition yards which has not come into force because not enough countries have signed up to it yet. This agreement, the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, 2009 (HKC), is now at risk because the EU has drawn up a regulation that goes further than the HKC.

The guidance issued with the EU Ship Recycling Regulation effectively rules out running a vessel up a beach at high tide and gradually pulling it ashore and breaking it up. That, more or less, is the way ships have been broken up for generations and is the way most of today's time expired vessels are recycled. The EU regulation implies that ships should be broken up in dry docks, a practice in very limited use and largely confined to Europe.