Alim Hossain is a sanitation worker who lives in southeastern Bangladesh’s port city of Chittagong with his wife and three sons.
He and his wife, a low-paid domestic helper, struggle to maintain the five-member family with about US$3 per day. Despite the difficulties, Hossain, 40, a Muslim, is happy to be alive today after narrowly escaping death six years ago.
Hossain was a cutter man at a shipbreaking yard in Sitakunda, north of Chittagong, for seven years before he quit in 2014. His daily income was US$5-7 per day depending on overtime.
He was one of an estimated 30,000 workers employed by 50-65 shipbreaking companies that import old ships from all over the world to dismantle and recycle for steel.
Gangs of workers carry out perhaps the world’s most dangerous and dirtiest job dissecting hulking ships mostly with their bare hands, blow torches, sledgehammers and almost no protective gear.
Accidents and deaths are common in the shipbreaking industry, which the International Labor Organization (ILO) considers as a major cause of occupational and environmental hazards around the world.
After an average life span of 25-30 years, ships become burdens for owners as insurers refuse to take their liabilities.
In the West, any old ship must be dismantled in green-certified shipbreaking yards with advanced technology and expensive processes.
In 2014, the European Union introduced legislation that requires its ships to be dismantled in proper disposal facilities.
However, the requirement can be evaded if the ship is reflagged after selling, activists say.
In most cases, old ships are sold to international dealers who resell the vessels to shipbreaking companies in countries with relatively lax regulations.
Most aged ships, often containing toxic materials such as asbestos and inflammable oil and gases, end up on the shores of Bangladesh, India, China and Pakistan. These countries together account for 90 percent of all ships dissected globally each year, according to Brussels-based NGO Shipbreaking Platform, a safe shipbreaking advocacy organization.
In 2019, Bangladesh retained the top spot globally with 234 ships dismantled, accounting for 42 percent of all ships broken around the world, the organization reported.
The downside was that 24 workers died and at least 34 were seriously injured in the yards that year, it noted.
Young Power in Social Action (YPSA), a Chittagong-based advocacy group, estimates the number of fatalities and casualties are much higher as some accidents are not reported.
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