How Ships Are Recycled Responsibly

A merchant ship is one of the most completely recyclable objects humans build. Between 90 and 95 percent of a vessel's weight can be recovered, and the overwhelming majority of that is steel, which can be melted and rerolled almost indefinitely without losing its properties. In principle, dismantling a ship at the end of its life is a model of the circular economy: a 20,000 tonne bulk carrier becomes reinforcing bar, and the energy saved by using scrap rather than iron ore is substantial, commonly cited at somewhere between 60 and 75 percent.

In practice, ship recycling has been one of the most dangerous industrial activities in the world, and the gap between the responsible process and the prevailing reality remains wide. The Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships entered into force on 26 June 2025, creating mandatory international rules for the first time. More than a year of operation has now produced evidence about what the framework changes and what it does not. Here is how the process is supposed to work, followed by an honest account of how much of the industry is actually following it.

 

1. The Ship Reaches End of Life

 

A vessel is scrapped when it stops making commercial sense: when survey and repair costs exceed what the ship can earn, when it can no longer meet regulatory requirements, or when its residual scrap value beats its operating value. For most commercial tonnage this arrives somewhere between 20 and 30 years of age.

What has changed is that the decision is increasingly driven by regulation rather than steel fatigue. Carbon intensity ratings, the full phase-in of the EU Emissions Trading System for shipping, and fuel regulations that penalise older and less efficient engines have all shortened the economic life of vessels that remain physically sound. Yet 2025 saw only 321 ships dismantled worldwide, a historically low figure, because strong freight markets and the longer voyages caused by Red Sea diversions kept ageing tonnage profitably employed. The demolition wave that decarbonisation implies has been deferred rather than cancelled, and yard capacity will be tested when it arrives.

 

2. Hazardous Materials Are Identified

 

Every ship covered by the Convention must carry an Inventory of Hazardous Materials, a document mapping where asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls, heavy metals, ozone-depleting substances, residual hydrocarbons and other dangerous materials sit within the structure. It is maintained throughout the ship's operating life and finalised before recycling.

The inventory is the keystone of the entire system, because everything downstream depends on it. A recycling plan cannot be written without it, workers cannot be warned without it, and waste cannot be routed to the right disposal facility without it. It is also the stage where quality varies most. Inventories compiled cheaply from drawings rather than from physical sampling routinely miss materials that were added during decades of refits and repairs, and a worker cutting into a bulkhead relies on a document prepared by someone who may never have visited the ship.

 

3. The Recycling Yard Is Authorized

 

Under the Convention, a facility must be authorised by its national authority and must demonstrate arrangements for worker safety, environmental protection, emergency response, monitoring and record keeping. Authorisation is what separates a regulated recycling operation from a stretch of beach with cutting torches on it.

Authorisation has expanded quickly. India now reports more than 100 Convention-compliant facilities, the largest number of any country, concentrated at Alang in Gujarat, supported by a workers' training centre, a residential colony built by the Gujarat Maritime Board, a Red Cross hospital and a treatment, storage and disposal facility for hazardous waste. Pakistan has brought its first three yards to Statements of Compliance. BIMCO's assessment of the first year was measured rather than triumphal, describing a transition that is difficult, imperfect and slower than many would like, and flagging certification delays along with the need for cross-checks to stop unrecognised entities issuing compliance documents. The integrity of authorisation depends on the integrity of the certifiers, and that layer is still being built.

 

4. A Ship-Specific Plan Is Created

 

The yard prepares a Ship Recycling Plan for that individual vessel, setting out the dismantling sequence based on its design, structure and hazardous material inventory. The plan is reviewed and approved before work begins.

This step matters more than its procedural appearance suggests, because ship dismantling is structurally dangerous in ways that are not obvious. A hull is a system of stresses held in balance, and cutting it in the wrong order can cause uncontrolled collapse. Tanks that once held fuel or cargo accumulate explosive vapour, and hot work on an inadequately gas-freed tank is the single most common cause of mass-casualty accidents in the industry. In 2025 an explosion in a tank aboard the Banglar Jyoti at the Ziri Subedar yard in Bangladesh injured eight workers, which is precisely the failure mode a ship-specific plan and proper gas-freeing procedure exist to prevent.

 

5. Hazardous Materials Are Removed Safely

 

Trained workers isolate, remove, label, handle and store hazardous substances before the structural dismantling begins, using procedures designed to protect both people and the surrounding environment.

The sequencing here is the whole argument. Responsible recycling removes the poison first and cuts the steel afterwards. The alternative, cutting first and dealing with contamination as it emerges, is faster and cheaper and is why the industry acquired its reputation. Asbestos lagging removed without respiratory protection produces disease that appears twenty years later and is almost never recorded as an industrial injury, which means the human cost of shipbreaking is systematically understated by the accident statistics. Oil residues, tank sludge and paint chips released onto an open shore enter sediment and the food chain directly. Doing this stage properly requires enclosed handling, trained crews, protective equipment and somewhere legitimate to send the waste, and each of those is a cost that undercutting yards avoid.

 

6. The Ship Is Dismantled

 

Equipment and structures are progressively dismantled, with recyclable materials separated from hazardous waste and non-recyclable material. Work typically moves from the superstructure downward and from the interior outward, with large sections cut free, lowered and broken down into manageable plate.

The critical variable is where the ship sits while this happens. Dismantling alongside a quay or in a dry dock keeps the vessel on an impermeable surface with drainage, containment and crane access, so anything that spills is captured and heavy lifting is mechanised. Beaching runs the ship up onto a tidal mudflat, where it is cut apart on permeable sediment washed twice daily by the tide, with sections dragged up the beach by winch. The difference determines whether contamination can be contained and whether heavy steel can be handled by machine rather than by workers standing beneath it. This distinction is the central unresolved dispute in the industry, and the Convention does not settle it.

 

7. Materials Enter New Supply Chains

 

Steel, machinery, generators, pumps, electrical equipment, furniture and fittings are recovered for reuse or recycling. Scrap steel goes to rerolling mills and electric arc furnaces, and secondhand marine equipment supplies a large international trade.

The economics of this stage are what make the industry viable and also what drive it toward low-cost jurisdictions. Recycled steel requires far less energy than primary production from iron ore, which is a genuine climate benefit, and in countries with limited domestic ore the scrap stream from shipbreaking supplies a meaningful share of construction steel. Alang's output feeds Indian rerolling mills directly. The reuse trade in equipment is less visible but substantial, and it is one reason yards resist destructive dismantling methods: an intact generator is worth far more than its weight in scrap.

 

8. Waste Is Managed Responsibly

 

Hazardous waste is kept separate and transferred to authorised facilities for treatment or disposal, preventing contamination of soil, water and the communities living nearby.

This is where the chain most often breaks, because it is the only stage that generates pure cost with no recoverable value. Downstream waste management is also the hardest element for an inspector to verify, since it happens away from the yard and after the auditors have left. Certifying that a facility has a contract with a disposal site is straightforward. Establishing that every tonne of asbestos and oily sludge actually arrived there is not. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform pointed to a fuel spill at an Indian yard in June 2026 that was visible for more than six miles as evidence of what it called fundamental inabilities to contain pollutants when dismantling takes place on tidal mudflats.

 

The Gap Between the Process and the Practice

 

The eight steps above describe a system that exists and functions at good yards. The aggregate numbers describe something else.

Of the 321 ships dismantled worldwide in 2025, 214 were beached in South Asia, roughly 67 percent of vessels and around 85 percent of global tonnage, because the largest ships go to the beaches. Eleven workers were killed in South Asian yards during the year and at least 62 were injured, figures the Platform treats as minimums given opaque incident reporting. Two of those deaths occurred during the beaching of the Seapeak Asia. Turkey's Aliağa yards, which take most EU-flagged tonnage and dismantle alongside rather than on a beach, recorded three fatal accidents of their own, a reminder that the method is not the only determinant of safety. European yards, meanwhile, operate at significant under-capacity, because owners will not pay their prices when alternatives exist.

The mechanism that sustains this is well documented and largely untouched by the Convention. A vessel heading for demolition is typically sold to a cash buyer, an intermediary that takes ownership, renames the ship, and reflags it to a registry with minimal oversight for a final voyage. By the time the vessel beaches, its original owner no longer appears on the paperwork and its flag state is no longer one that ratified anything relevant. The Platform's 2025 list still traced vessels back to their beneficial owners, naming Greek operator Vangelis Marinakis as its Worst Corporate Dumper for tankers sold into Bangladesh, and identifying vessels linked to Seapeak, MSC, NYK Line and Mitsui OSK, alongside 21 Chinese-owned, 19 South Korean-owned and 17 UAE-owned ships sold to South Asian breakers. Ownership is traceable. Liability, under current rules, largely is not. A further complication has emerged from sanctions, which can push vessels away from compliant yards and toward facilities willing to ask fewer questions.

 

The Beaching Question and the EU's 2026 Decision

 

On 14 August 2026 the European Commission added two Alang yards, Shree Ram Vessel Scrap and YSI Recyclers, to the European List of approved ship recycling facilities. India thereby became the first non-OECD country with yards on that list, which now holds 41 facilities: 30 in the EU, 10 in Turkey and one in the United States. EU-flagged ships may now legally be recycled at those two Indian plots.

The decision is the most consequential development in ship recycling policy since the Convention came into force, and it is genuinely contested. The case for it is that engagement beats exclusion. India has invested heavily, built training and waste infrastructure, and certified more Convention-compliant yards than anywhere else, and rewarding that investment with market access creates an incentive other yards can follow. Excluding South Asia entirely has not stopped beaching; it has simply meant EU-flagged ships get reflagged before they arrive.

The case against, argued by the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, is that the yards still dismantle by beaching, a method EU regulation does not permit within Europe, and that approving them while simultaneously removing a Turkish facility for deficiencies sets what the Platform called a chilling double standard that undermines the EU's own recycling sector. The June 2026 spill is offered as evidence that containment on a tidal flat is not achievable regardless of certification.

Both positions rest on the same underlying fact: the Convention set a floor that authorised beaching yards can meet. Whether that floor is high enough is the question the next few years will answer, and the honest summary is that the Hong Kong Convention is a real improvement on nothing and a considerable distance from a guarantee.

 

Did You Know?

 

The Hong Kong Convention took sixteen years to enter into force. It was adopted in May 2009 and required ratification by 15 states representing 40 percent of world merchant shipping by gross tonnage, whose combined annual ship recycling volume over the preceding decade amounted to at least 3 percent of their tonnage. That last condition was the obstacle: it required the major recycling nations themselves to join, which meant the treaty could not take effect until the countries whose beaches it was written about agreed to be bound by it. Bangladesh and Liberia provided the final ratifications in June 2023, starting the two-year clock that expired on 26 June 2025.

 

Note: This article reflects the state of the industry as of September 2026, drawing on sources including the International Maritime Organization, the NGO Shipbreaking Platform's 2025 list of ships dismantled worldwide, BIMCO's 2026 review of Convention implementation, the European Commission's European List of ship recycling facilities, and reporting from India's Directorate General of Shipping on the first year of implementation at Alang. Casualty figures for South Asian yards are widely regarded as minimums because incident reporting is incomplete.