Ship dismantling in Bangladesh

Decommissioned commercial ships beached and cut up for scrap by workers earning ~50 cents/day with acetylene torches; average occupational lifespan ~5 years.

Lots of rules have changed over the years, getting tighter, increasing the cost. So to a certain extent, what do we do? Ship the problems overseas. All the commercial ships were being decommissioned in Bangladesh. On the last trip they'd just run aground in Bangladesh, just up on the beach. Then thousands of little Bangladeshis with their acetylene torches, probably earning 50 cents a day, would go in and cut the stuff up for scrap. There's asbestos and everything. The average life of one of these ship dismantlers was like 5 years. Given the fact that they would starve to death if they didn't have the job, and starving to death is even quicker than 5 years.

When they come back, increase your inspection budget on those welds and see if the cracks are growing. You probably can't even find the cracks for 10 or 20 years. They may even go the whole life of the ship. Until you put it in mothballs, or send it — you don't send those to Bangladesh, do you. You used to blow them up off of Newport News, or Nags Head — that's actually sort of the story in Hunt for Red October, right. Patrick Henry. They used to scuttle them and bury them in the ocean with the reactor too. That was before some people decided that wasn't a good thing to do.

Used as illustration of disposal end-of-life problem analogous to aircraft parked in Arizona desert. Workers cut up beached ships with acetylene torches, exposed to asbestos and residual chemicals; reported life expectancy of three years for workers. Tom notes "we export our environmental problems."

This is a problem for aircraft and other things. Typical lifetime on a commercial aircraft is a hundred thousand hours. You park it in Arizona after a hundred thousand hours. It's full of cracks. Hopefully none of them have propagated to crash it, but you don't want to keep flying it, and you can't afford to repair it. You leave it there for spare parts or for whatever reason. You don't do that with ships. What do you do with ships? We used to sink them, but there's too many PCBs down in there with all the other stuff. What do we do with ships? They take them to Bangladesh and run them aground. They literally run them aground on the beach, and all these little Bangladeshis go out with acetylene torches and cut them up. Why? Because they're full of asbestos, and we couldn't even begin to cut up and recycle that ship in the United States because of the asbestos standards. But in Bangladesh they have no asbestos standards, and frankly it's almost a crime what's going on.