Obsolete Ships Can Be Considered Toxic Waste

GENEVA, Switzerland, November 1, 2004 (ENS) - Ships can be considered toxic waste under international law at the end of their term of usefulness, countries that are Parties to an international agreement on hazardous waste have decided. Environmental groups Greenpeace and the Basel Action Network declared the decision a positive move that helps to limit the environmental dangers of ship breaking.

The seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-7) to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was held from October 25 through 29 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The meeting was attended by over 450 officials representing more than 114 Parties, four observer nations, including the United States, eight United Nations bodies and agencies, and more than 24 intergovernmental, nongovernmental and other organizations.

"This is a major step towards ensuring that the people and the environments of the world's ship breaking countries no longer have to bear the burden of the shipping industry's toxic trash," said Marietta Harjono of Greenpeace.

"At a time when some 2,200 single hull oil tankers are due to be scrapped, the decision could not have come a day too soon, "Harjono said. "With today's decision we can work to avoid solving one environmental crisis by creating another in ship breaking countries."

Chair of the Working Group on dismantling of ships, Roy Watkinson of Great Britain (Photo courtesy Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB))

It will also create new demand for the development of environmentally conscious ship recycling capacity in developed countries.

The resolution passed by the delegates invites the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to establish a reporting system for ships destined for dismantling, that ensures an equivalent level of control as established under the Basel Convention. The IMO is also asked to continue work aimed at the establishment of mandatory requirements to ensure the environmentally sound management of ship dismantling which might include pre-decontamination.

That obligation can be expected to increase demands for decontamination of ships before export which had been urged during the meeting by the shipbreaking countries of India, Bangladesh, and Turkey.

The IMO and the International Labour Organization, together with the Parties to the Basel Convention, have agreed to establish a joint working group on the ship scrapping.

Some in the shipping industry opposed the Basel Convention's involvement in this issue, hoping instead that the IMO would assume total control over end of life ships and impose less rigorous standards. The United States, Japan, and representatives of the shipping industry maneuvered without success to block this decision.

The rusting 15,000 ton former U.S. Navy Reserve vessel Caloosahatchee arrived on November 12, 2003 at the Teeside, where she remains at the centre of a legal and environmental controversy. (Photo Ian Britton courtesy FreeFoto)

That course of action has been blocked by a BAN lawsuit in the U.S. courts and by British regulatory processes, so the U.S. Maritime Administration has been signing dismantling contracts with domestic shipyards to break and recycle the ghost ships.

In the latest deal, North American Ship Recycling, a shipyard in Sparrows Point, Maryland, will be paid $2.3 million to dismantle two aging ships from the Maritime Administration’s James River Reserve Fleet in Fort Eustis, Virginia, under a pair of contracts expected to create new jobs for local residents, according to an announcement on September 13, 2004, by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.

North American Ship Recycling, a subsidiary of Barletta Willis, LLC, will get two retired ships, the Lauderdale and the Mormacmoon, sometime near the end of the year, Mineta said following a tour of the company's facility at Sparrows Point Shipyard. The company is expected to hire 50 people to do the work, nearly doubling its existing payroll.

Mineta noted the facilities at the Baltimore shipyard provide for scrapping of the ships in dry docks, ensuring that the environment will be protected while the work is being completed. The majority of the steel from the ships is expected to be recycled at a local business located in Sparrows Point, he said.

In other developments at the Basel Convention in Geneva, the meeting adopted a standardized reporting format for the notification of national definitions or changes to national definitions of hazardous wastes.

Another decision requests the Secretariat to strengthen cooperation with the other secretariats of chemicals related multilateral environmental agreements such as the Stockholm Convention on persistant organic pollutants, as well as the United Nations Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization and others.

On the dismantling of ships, this decision requests stronger collaboration with the IMO, ILO, the London Convention, and UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The decision calls for increased cooperation with the World Health Organization on the development of hazardous characteristics, and with the World Customs Organization on the identification of wastes in its Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System.

On behalf of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Sergei Ordzhonikidze, director general of the UN Office in Geneva, urged Parties to minimize hazardous waste generation at source and adopt the lifecycle approach.

UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer at the Basel Convention meeting in Geneva (Photo courtesy ENB)

The Basel Convention was adopted in 1989 and entered into force on May 5, 1992. It was created to address concerns over the management, disposal and transboundary movement of the estimated 400 million metric tons of hazardous wastes that are produced worldwide each year.

“The Basel Convention provides the only global forum for dealing with all aspects of the global waste challenge,” said Sachiko Kuwabara-Yamamoto, the Convention’s executive secretary. She urged delegates to forge sustainable financial solutions and strengthen the role of industry, civil society and local governments.

The guiding principles of the Convention are: transboundary movements of hazardous wastes should be reduced to a minimum; they should be managed in an environmentally sound manner; hazardous wastes should be treated and disposed of as close as possible to their source of generation; and hazardous waste generation should be minimized at source.