The growth of international trade in the current era of globalization has created a boom for shipping and ship builders, not to mention the growth of a wide range of related jobs. Just last year the three biggest ports in the U.S. (Los Angeles, Long Beach and New York/New Jersey) handled ships carrying nearly 21 million shipping containers (TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent containers, as they're known). Add to that all the ships carrying oil, grain, lumber and other non-containerized cargo, plus the booming cruise industry, and you've got a lot of ships sailing the high seas.
Have you ever wondered what happens to those ships when they're too old to run? If you haven't asked, you should, because the answer is fascinating.
BBC reporter Roland Buerk describes a little-known corner of the global economy in his 2006 book, Breaking Ships: How Supertankers and Cargo Ships are Dismantled on the Beaches of Bangladesh. He explains how those ships are bought by Bangladeshi businessmen, run aground, and taken apart by an army of laborers using simple hand tools and machines, and the strength of their backs.
Big seagoing ships, it seems, have a useful life of about 25 years. After that, insurance companies won't insure them. Demand for steel in Asia means the component parts of the ship are too valuable to just toss them into some oceanic scrap heap.
Breaking Ships follows the dismantling of the oil tanker Asian Tiger over six months in 2004 on the beach at Chittagong. Through the book we meet many of the workers, from Captain Enam Mohammed Chowdhury, an expert in running ships aground, to "cutter" Mohammed Yunnus who works with a team of men who cut the hull into tabletop-sized steel plates with hand-held blowtorches. We follow foreman Mohammed Abdul Hakkim as he travels back to his home village in Bogra, in far northwest Bangladesh, to recruit laborers. We watch a propeller cutter team led by Mohammed Motin as they carefully break up the propeller with two sledgehammers and a hand-held chisel. It's delicate work, as the propeller is made up of a highly valuable metal alloy. We briefly meet South Korean buyer W.K. Chung, who travels regularly to Chittagong in search of used propellers for new ships under construction. And we meet the family of Mohammed Mohsin, whose father bought the first ship for scrap, and grew his PHP Group company into a corporate empire.
Everything from the ship is taken apart and sold. Furniture, fire extinguishers, life vests and lifeboats, cables and wires stripped by children, they're all bought by entrepreneurs who set up stalls along the road from the Chittagong beach for resale. Steel plates are melted down at nearby factories and rerolled into rods that will be used on construction sites throughout the country. But before you get the idea that this is some kind of recycler's dream, Buerk describes working conditions on the beach:
The air is regularly filled with the smoke from polluting fires as oil, plastics, PVC, and other unwanted substances are burned off. The men working on the beach and the people living nearby are being exposed to these substances continuously. The world's shipping industry and the fortunes of the yard owners rest on the men's willingness to take the risk of injury or death for just a dollar or so a day.
Not only this, but as the Asian Tiger is being dismantled, all along the beach other cargo ships, cruise ships and tankers are being taken apart as well. This is big business.
For the most part, Buerk avoids the pro- and anti-globalization rhetoric a book like this could engender. He simply describes how dismantling these ships creates business opportunities and desperately needed wages, but at a high price in worker deaths, injuries and sickness. He alludes to the environmental damage being done, but doesn't explore it in detail. His story focuses on the people.
The book is filled with photos showing the workers, the ship and beach. Reproduced in black and white, they're not the best you've ever seen, but I won't soon forget the image of fifteen men in nothing more than long-sleeve shirts and lungis (a men's sarong) carrying a 1,700 pound steel plate on their shoulders in the pouring rain, barefoot. That and the stacks of hundreds - perhaps thousands - more steel plates piled up behind them, all waiting to be moved.
Clocking in at 160 pages, Breaking Ships is a quick read. Kudos to whoever decided to include an index, so often left out of nonfiction books these days. Read this book if you want to understand the workers and businesspeople engaged in the strange new economies created by international trade.