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Malta-flagged ‘Pride’ sails to Asia, where toxic dumping is a nightmare
Matthew Vella
The beaches and ports around the Indian subcontinent are a disastrous melange of toxic waste, broken ships and cheap labour – the heart of a ship scrapping industry free of environmental and occupational safety legislation and a cemetery for end-of-life vessels which are brought to rest to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, abetted by the low costs of ship breaking in Asia.
The Maltese government is being asked by Greenpeace Mediterranean to brush up its act and take on Basel’s international obligations on waste shipments, to put pressure on end-of-life vessels taken to Asia for dumping. But with the fifth largest maritime fleet in the world, it is debatable as to whether the Maltese government will be giving up on this source of revenue for the sake of unilateral action on the prevention of toxic waste dumping.
The Maltese-flagged tanker ‘AP Pride’ is now its way to a Chittagong harbour in Bangladesh destined for breaking and scrapping, the latest in a long list of toxic ships regularly sent to the Indian subcontinent for dumping. Fifteen ships under the Maltese flagged have already been dumped in Asia this year; in 2003, it was 34, ranking Malta second after Panama as the country which exported most toxic ships for breaking to Asia. The ‘AP Prdie,’ owned by Australian company ASP Shipmanagement Group, left Durban in South Africa late August, due to reach Asia shortly to be ‘laid to rest’ after 25 years at sea.
Cash before contamination
According to Greenpeace’s report on ship breaking, entitled ‘Playing Hide and Seek,’ which was presented to Competitiveness and Communications Minister Censu Galea and Environment Minister George Pullicino, the ship breaking industry in Asia is responsible for a remarkable source of environmental degradation. With large amounts of hazardous waste contained in the structures of vessels, including asbestos and heavy metals, the breaking process is dispersing toxic waste into the sea, earth and the air.
Malta’s reputation as a flag of convenience, also being the fifth largest ship register in the world, has been lambasted by Greenpeace who say the breaking process has shifted to the Asian shores from Europe in ports and beaches where environmental and health and safety measures are poor or non-existent. Ship owners retrieve an average of USD1.9 million (Lm800,000) for a scrapped ship. The Greenpeace report notes that whilst wages for Asian workers in the breaking industry are low, they are constantly exposed to enormous health hazards – the group said that asbestos is broken by unprotected workers by hand, a notorious practice which is automatically conducive to permanent respiratory problems such as asbestosis, due to the inhaling of dust fibres which scar the lungs.
Earlier this week, Greenpeace representatives met with Censu Galea and George Pullicino, calling on the Maltese government to respect the obligations contained in the Basel Convention and the European Waste Shipment Regulation, which obliges countries to award consent to ship owners to send vessels for breaking only according to environmentally sound measures.
The “cordial” meeting, as described by Censu Galea himself, may have done little to inspire the Maltese government to take action. “If action is taken unilaterally,” he told MaltaToday on the idea of having Malta take the initiative on safe ship breaking, “we shall lose many ships from our flag, which will move on to others. I believe that such proposals should be discussed at IMO and EU level, but it would be useless to take action on our own. We will lose many ships from our flag.”
Likewise, Environment Minister George Pullicino is in agreement: “The global environment will not benefit at all if a flag state loses its competitiveness to another flag state if the polluting activity remains unchecked.”
Pullicino has also ruled out unilateral action: “Any initiative by flags states on ship breaking will have to be taken at a global level if the desired environmental improvements are to take place.”
“Ship breaking intrinsically includes a polluting activity wherever it is carried out. Any polluting activity should be a matter of concern to everyone,” Pullicino said about whether he was worried about the environmental consequences of scrapped ships registered under the Maltese flag. “The issue is how to address such polluting activities effectively… Any proposals regarding the maritime industry have to be discussed with the maritime authorities if the activity is to be regulated in such a way to mitigate the negative environmental impacts.”
Flag of convenience
According to Galea, the introduction of more stringent rules and regulations in ship dumping and breaking will already see ship owners leaving the Maltese registry for other countries which offer flexible regulations.
“Nevertheless we have always maintained that the Maltese registry is not a flag of convenience,” Galea said in a press statement.
Be that as it may, the International Federation of Transport Workers is clear on Malta’s status as a FOC, which still carries with it the indelible blotch of the Erika disaster.
And it is in fact Erika itself which today places the Maltese ship register in a ‘catch-22’ situation: following the 1999 environmental disaster unleashed with the breaking of the Maltese-flagged Erika, when the 25-year-old single-hulled tanker released 10,000 tons of oil across the coast of Brittany in France, the EU forced a speedy phasing out of all single-hulled tankers, in a series of regulations dubbed Erika I and Erika II.
The packages effectively mean that globally, by 2010 around 2,200 single hull oil tankers from all over the world will have to be taken out of the market, estimated to generate up to 16.7 million tonnes of waste – five to six times higher the average annual level of scrapping.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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