Global Restrictions on Toxic Maritime Trade
On October 29, 2004, delegates at the Geneva meeting of the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal agreed to reclassify obsolete ships as toxic waste despite the opposition of shipping industry representatives from the US and Japan. The 163 countries which have signed up to the convention will no longer be permitted to scrap ships contaminated with substances such as asbestos, PCBs, toxic paints in India, Turkey, Bangladesh, China and other developing countries. According to Marietta Harjono of Greenpeace:
“This is a major step towards ensuring that the people and environments of the world's ship breaking countries no longer have to bear the burden of the shipping industry's toxic trash… 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. With today's decision we can work to avoid solving one environmental crisis by creating another in ship breaking countries.”1
Under the new rules, Basel Convention signatories must inform recipient countries of the presence of prohibited substances on old ships, ensure shipbreaking is performed with due care and attention and minimize the transnational movement of hazardous wastes. Demands for ships to be decontaminated prior to export are likely to create a greater market for “green ship recycling capacity in developed countries;” shipbreaking facilities in developing countries must be improved.
Shipping industry lobbyists who support the less stringent line taken by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) denounced this reclassification, stating that end-of-life ships were not waste. Jim Puckett. of the Basel Action Network, disagreed:
“The Basel Convention decided that while the IMO (International Maritime Organization) is welcome to solve aspects of this problem in the future, Basel must begin to solve it today… They vowed to fulfil their existing obligations and prevent the cheap and dirty dumping of toxic ships on some of the poorest communities on earth - a situation that really is the shame of shipping, killing a person per day, either from the slow death by cancer, or from the violent death from gas explosions.”
November 3, 2004
_______
1 Greenpeace Press release: Obsolete toxic ship dumping to be controlled. October 29, 2004. Website: http://www.greenpeaceweb.org/shipbreak
