Breaking up is hard to do: why ship recycling needs reform

Shipowners may have to bite the bullet and pay a premium to design more easily recyclable vessels under increasingly prescriptive regulations, according to International Ship Recycling Association (IRSA) director Reinoud Pijpers. Mr Pijpers made the observation while speaking at Riviera Maritime Media’s webinar, The many benefits of designing newbuilds for recycling in late September.

But the “beach” sector of the recycling industry in Bangladesh and elsewhere may also have to run their businesses by higher standards, as a more level playing field is enforced.

More positively, beach recyclers could extract considerably more profits from obsolete ships if they were provided with deeper information about the market value of a wide variety of components. Currently, most ships are broken up just for steel and potentially saleable items binned.

The industry needs reform, argued Mr Pijpers. IRSA sets strict guidelines on everything from the treatment of asbestos to safety precautions, all of which require investment. “There is no level playing field,” he said. “Competition with the beaches is unequal and unfair.”

Backing the views of the other panellists, he said that recycling should be considered in the earliest phase of the design process. Interestingly, Mr Pijper raised the issue of the vessel’s planned operating life as a factor in recycling. If it is designed for less than 30 years, the hull could be made thinner and new technology introduced.

The bad news is that recyclable design is hardly on the agenda yet, as Anantha Padmanabhan, managing director for Europe of Singapore-based ship design group SeaTech Solutions, explained. One of the difficulties in recycling is the dearth of information about the materials, equipment and fittings to be dismantled. Much of it is widely scattered across documents, rather than neatly summarised. Also, the ships themselves are not designed for their ultimate and inevitable breakup. Access to different sections is difficult. Hazardous materials are present. It is inherently dangerous to cut up a vessel. And finally, the eventual disposal of parts is haphazard.

“The ships themselves are not designed for their ultimate and inevitable breakup”

Some of these problems, said Mr Padmanabhan, arise from the design of the vessel itself, since ships have traditionally been built primarily for their operational life and not for recycling. That is why it is preferable “to consider recycling issues right from the start of the design,” he said. That would require designers to specify the use of equipment that is more easily disposed of, such as standardised components and non-hazardous and recyclable materials, and to minimise the variety of fixtures and fittings. They could also avoid prescribing special fixtures that take longer to remove, perhaps requiring special tools.

“It is a good idea to consider dismantability right from the beginning,” he summarised. There is a bonus in this, added Mr Padmanabhan, because it makes for a more easily operated vessel.

A ship’s obsolescence must be considered at the outset, emphasised Dr Rafet Emek Kurt, associate professor Strathclyde University’s faculty of engineering, Europe’s largest marine technology research institute. Currently, only the steel in obsolete ships is fully recycled because it attracts good prices. “Most of the products, parts and equipment do not complete the circle,” he said, adding, “There is no link between end-of-life and the ship’s design.”

In the European remanufacturing sector, an important element of the circular economy, the maritime industry lags every other industry by a considerable margin. As Dr Kurt pointed out, it has a “remanufacturing intensity” of just 0.3%, putting it far behind other giant transport industries such as aerospace (11.5%) and automotive and rail (both 1.1%). Only seven firms in Europe conduct remanufacturing operations in maritime, compared with 1,000 in aerospace, 2,360 in automotive and 30 in rail.