PROJECT 1: From Hartlepool to Chittagong: the life and death of ships
This project involves two case studies. We focus on two sites, in which ships are scrapped, in very different ways, under different regulatory regimes, with differing implications for the ways in which wastes are generated, treated and disposed of. One of these sites is the north east of England, a region that at one stage (around the end of the C19th) produced about 80% of the ships produced in the global capitalist economy but in which ship production is now to all intents and purposes ended. Instead, the region – and more particularly one site in Hartlepool (ABLE UK’s Graythorp yard), previously a ship construction yard later converted for the production of oil platforms for the North Sea - has become the location for the dismantling and disposal of derelict and toxic navy ships imported from the USA. The main shipbreaking sites in the world, however, are located in Bangladesh, India, China and Turkey. Our second site will be Chittagong in Bangladesh, where ship-breaking is carried out in open and largely unregulated yards on the beaches of the Bay of Bengal, using very simple and labour-intensive methods of dismantling and destruction. One reason for selecting Chittagong is that we have good links with the local university (the Head of Geography, Professor M. Shahidul Islam, has a PhD from Durham) and we would necessarily involve local researchers in the project, for both cultural and linguistic reasons. A second is political. The shipbreaking activities at Alang (India) have attracted considerable attention from global environmental campaigners and from the international labour movement, making it virtually impossible for westerners to gain access to the companies running these yards. In contrast, shipbreaking at Chittagong has recently been the site for a more academic project – Edward Burtynsky’s published photographic images of breaking, destruction and decay. These images – and their interpretation – will provide one strand to our work on Chittagong.
Our studies of the ABLE UK and Chittagong yards will focus on (i) examining the passage of ships into these yards, and (ii) their ‘breaking’ – or not, for one of the ironies of the Hartlepool US ghost fleet story is that the ships currently remain ships, frozen in a network of licences, planning law and the (in)activities of agents of local and national government.
© The Waste of the World 2009
