Loading summary
Transcript95 lines
- [00:00]
A
Wondry subscribers can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad free right now. Join Wondry in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
- [00:21]
Somewhere along the vast shores of the Indian Ocean, there's a stretch of beach that's been transformed into into an otherworldly graveyard for some of the world's largest pieces of trash, where enormous ships are beached and then taken apart to be sold as scrap. A tidal flat littered with the half disassembled carcasses of oil tankers, freighters and cruise ships. Oil and toxic sludge leak from their innards onto the sand before washing out to sea. Welcome to the Gadani shipbreaking yards in Pakistan.
- [00:57]
Here, thousands of workers. Workers swarm over the vessels, tearing them apart with nothing but hand tools and blowtorches. Workers dangle like acrobats as they shear away massive steel plates that topple down to the beach below. Others cut into the hulls at ground level, inches from cargo tanks still holding combustible fuel and gas. For this, they're paid almost nothing, just a few dollars a day.
- [01:25]
Back on November 1, 2016, Gidani was the second busiest ship breaking yard in the world, with enough separate plots to break down more than 100 ships at once. Around 12,000 people worked there in total. One of them was a man in his early 20s who we'll call Abdul Rahman. Abdul Rahman asked that we not use his real name. The owners of the shipyards have been known to retaliate against workers who speak out.
- [01:52]
B
In the beginning, the work was tough because we worked with fire and steel. Then I gradually learned. Before I used to be a welder's helper. Now I'm a welder myself. So it used to be tough, but now not so much.
- [02:06]
A
On this particular day, around 10am, Abdul Rahman takes a break with his co workers. He's having some tea when suddenly down the beach, there's an explosion.
- [02:16]
B
The explosion was so loud that we were shaken by it. I had never heard an explosion so loud in my entire life.
- [02:25]
A
Abdul Rahman and his colleagues weren't sure what to do, so they went back to work. But then their boss called them over.
- [02:33]
B
Our senior, we call him, our foreman, came and told us to stop working. He said we have the day off since there was an explosion and people were hurt. So we stopped working in solidarity with the people who were hurt.
- [02:49]
A
After they got the day off, Abdul Rahman and his co workers went to the plot where the explosion had happened. There they see its source, a tanker called the Mt Aces Shrapnel is strewn across the beach and a column of thick black smoke rises from the ship.
- [03:07]
B
And by that time, the place was cordoned off by the police. There were ambulances that were taking out injured people. There were army helicopters that were trying to put out the fire because the fire was still on. The police were trying to keep the crowd away. And there were media people and journalists also present at the site.
- [03:28]
A
Just two days earlier, workers from Godani had staged a protest in Karachi, the capital, demanding safer working conditions. Now the fate of many of those same workers was unknown, as was the question of what impact, if any, the disaster would have on one of the world's most dangerous jobs.
- [03:52]
From wondery, I'm zach goldbaum, and this is lawless planet.
- [04:01]
Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.
- [04:09]
C
Rather than taking him to the hospital, the shipyard owners just brought him out of the yard and threw him into the bed of a truck. It was just clear that his life didn't.
- [04:28]
A
At Raising Cane's, we're hyper focused on.
- [04:30]
D
Being the best at what we do.
- [04:31]
A
And getting it right every time. Cook to order chicken fingers, cane sauce, crinkle cut fries, coleslaw, Texas toast, iced tea and lemonade. It's our one love. But is the hype real? Yeah, it's real good. Raising Cane's chicken fingers, one love.
- [04:52]
Next time, order with our app or online.
- [04:59]
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, live with your legs, man.
- [05:04]
C
Santa.
- [05:05]
A
Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not. Of course he did. Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list. An elf? I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus much younger sister. And AT T Mobile, there's no trade in needed when you switch. So you can keep your old phone or give it as a gift. And the best part, you can make the switch to T mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber, the holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel finance agreement 256 gigs $830 eligible for in a new line $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes fees required. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com.
- [06:06]
Today's largest ships are massive. They can be up to a quarter of a mile long and carry hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo, everything from cars to oil and grain. And without them, our global economy would grind to a halt. 80% of our goods cross the ocean at some point on a freighter, tanker or container ship. And 80% of our seniors spend their golden years at the all you can eat buffet on cruise ships the size of a Vegas casino. Alright, that last statistic was made up, but it is true that most of the stuff you own probably spend some time at sea. These ships are so big and so vital to our economy that they might seem indeed indestructible, but in reality, most only have a lifespan of 25 to 30 years. So where do these behemoths go when they die? The answer is shipbreaking yards. When aging ships reach the end of the line, nearly all of them will end up on one of just three beaches in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The industry calls what happens on these beaches ship recycling and tristabilit is a good thing, and in some ways it is. Steel hulls, engines, electronics, even furniture get stripped and reused. But ships are also full of toxins. Oil, asbestos, lead based paint, PCBs, heavy metals. And on South Asia's ship breaking beaches, there's little infrastructure to handle them safely. Instead, waste seeps into the ocean and groundwater poisoning nearby ecosystems and communities. And the workers dismantling these giants, often with no training or protection, pay the highest price. Some die slowly from long term diseases like asbestosis. Others die in accidents, fires and explosions like the one at Gadani in 2016. That disaster was just one chapter in a much bigger story, one that spans oceans and and ends in some of the most dangerous and environmentally destructive workplaces on earth. So how do the world's biggest ships wind up getting taken apart by some of the world's most poorly paid workers? The answer to that question lies in the history of the Empty Aces, the oil tanker that Abdul Rahman saw engulfed in flames with scores of workers still inside.
- [08:35]
Decades before it met its fiery end. The MT Aces was called the Mobile Flinders, a tanker for the Mobil Australia Oil Corporation. It cleans as you drive, releasing all the power your car was designed to deliver. That's positive power from Mobil.
- [08:57]
At the Time of its launch in 1982, Mobile Flinders was the largest ship to ever fly the Australian flag. It held up to 47 million gallons of oil. Mobil was so proud of its new flagship tanker that it took out a full page ad in a Melbourne newspaper to announce when it set sail. But by 2002, it became too expensive to maintain, so Mobil sold off the Flinders. After that, the ship cycled through several different owners names and home countries. It was even converted from a tanker transporting oil around the world into a floating storage unit anchored in Indonesia because it was too old and run down for open ocean voyages. Finally, in 2016, it was renamed the Aces and reflagged to the tiny African nation of Djibouti. Why Djibouti? It has to do with this thing called flags of convenience. To avoid the taxes and regulations of their actual home ports, nearly three quarters of the world's merchant ships fly flags from countries where regulations are lax or non existent. Djibouti is one of those countries.
- [10:04]
E
There's a huge discrepancy between the actual owner country and the flag country.
- [10:11]
A
That's Yngville Jensen, the founder of the nonprofit NGO Shipbreaking Platform. She first got into this work after meeting a young boy in the hospital who'd been injured in a yard.
- [10:22]
E
He was maybe just 16 years old and he was lying in bed. He had gotten his legs completely crushed. His eyes were completely red. He'd probably been hit in the head. And that was really quite impactful.
- [10:40]
A
Since then, Jensen has fought for reforms in the way old ships are decommissioned and scrapped.
- [10:45]
E
But the older a ship gets, the less likely it is that it will have a European flag or US flag or Japanese flag. And there are particular flags that are really popular with end of life vessels, such as St. Kitsa, Nevis, Comoros, Palau, and even Mongolia.
- [11:09]
A
Yep, a boat from landlocked Mongolia. Usually when a ship gets renamed and reflagged just prior to scrapping, it's because it's been sold to a middleman, a cash buyer who often hides behind subsidiaries and shell companies to make them hard to trace.
- [11:25]
E
And then these companies take ownership of the vessel and rename it, often through a really bad paint job and just altering some of the letters. They will recruit it, register it somewhere else under a postbox company in some small island tax haven, and they will change the flag of the ship. And there's absolutely no transparency on ownership.
- [11:52]
A
In the case of the MTA sis, no cash buyer was ever clearly identified. The ship that had once been the pride of the Mobile Oil Corporation had been offloaded, its history painted over. Then in August 2016, as it rammed onto the beach of the Gidani shipbreaking yards, it changed hands yet again. Now it belonged to the owners of the yard where it would be dismantled.
- [12:20]
On the day before the explosion, the Mt Asis towers over the beach. It's nearly 1,000ft long, over 150ft wide and seven stories tall. Sparks are flying as workers scale the rusting oil tanker, taking blowtorches to it. As they cut into it, hundreds of tons of steel crash haphazardly onto the sand. The workers are literally pulling this 24,000 ton ship apart by hand. And they're doing it with basically no safety precautions. Here's Abdurrahman, the worker we heard from earlier who says that safety was not a priority even among the workers themselves.
- [13:02]
B
Before the incident, even though we used to get helmets, dungarees and gloves, we didn't use this care while working. We would just hide it and not wear it. We didn't like the helmets. They felt like a burden on our heads. Same with the dungarees. Sometimes we would wear them, other times we wouldn't. So we used to do things like that. We didn't even have safety officers in Gidani before.
- [13:28]
A
Abdul Rahman is assigned to another ship. But at the MTA's plot, two brothers are hard at work. 18 year old Ghulam Haider and and 32 year old Alam Khan. They're from a nearby village about six miles away where they live with their parents. Reportedly, there were about six feet of standing oil in the ship's tanks. To be clear, that's not supposed to be there. The oil should be completely drained before blowtorch work begins. But that night, yard supervisors urge workers to begin dismantling the ship anyway. One worker later recalled overhearing the yard manager giving the lead contractor an either they start welding work in the morning or they can leave. For workers like Ghulam and Alam, the choice is obvious. They are their families, sole breadwinners and like their fellow workers, they can't risk losing their jobs even if conditions are dangerous or illegal. Most of the workers at Gidani are migrants from Pakistan's poorest regions, living in shanties with no electricity or running water water and earning as little as $4 a day. And they have very few options outside the ship breaking yards. So the next morning, Ghulam and alam join about 250 workers dismantling the MT aces. Suddenly, there's a blast from inside the ship. The force of the explosion sends shrapnel up to a mile away.
- [14:59]
While his men battle the flames, a fire chief speaks to reporters in Urdu.
- [15:06]
He says the cause of the explosion is unclear, but the most likely explanation is that the workers cut into something flammable with their blowtorches. The fire chief says they've recovered 12 bodies and 47 more workers had been injured. Abdurrahman knew at least one of them.
- [15:25]
B
There was a worker from my village who didn't lose his life, but he was injured, badly injured. His arm and leg were burnt in the fire.
- [15:34]
A
And reports said that more than 100 workers were still trapped on the ship, their fates unknown.
- [15:42]
As the fire inside the Mt Aces raged, the first victims began arriving at the nearest hospital In Karachi, about 30 miles away. They had burns over 60 to 100% of their bodies. Most weren't expected to survive. Ghulam and Alam were among the dead. Their mother heard the explosion from their home six miles away. She rushed to the yard, but it was too late. Both died before she arrived. Their father told reporters that without them, he felt like both his arms had been broken.
- [16:17]
The blaze on the Mt Aces kept burning uncontrolled for three days. When it was all over, the body count had more than doubled. At least 28 workers were confirmed dead, but as many as 100 were still missing, so the death toll was likely much higher. The fire burned so hot that some bodies may have been completely incinerated. Others washed out to sea. Ultimately, the families of the deceased workers received one and a half million Pakistani rupees in compensation, about $14,000 at the time, 45 additional workers who were injured got smaller payouts. The plot's owner pleaded old age and ill health to avoid arrest. In response, workers across all the Gidani yards staged a three day strike. The yard where the accident occurred was shut down for a month. A report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan titled Horror in Gidani urged safety reforms, stricter screenings of incoming ships for oil and toxic residue, and stronger labor rights and protections. And Abdul Rahman reported seeing some improvements in the wake of the disaster.
- [17:30]
B
Now there's a proper safety officer. They hover and check if everyone's wearing their safety gear. Otherwise they let them know that they shouldn't come to work tomorrow. Before, we used to work very fast and we worked a lot. We used to work 12 to 14 hours a day. But gradually with time, with the implementation of safety measures, it's much easier. Now. Conditions aren't as tough anymore.
- [17:59]
A
But at the end of the day, many of the injured were eager to get back to work regardless of safety conditions. One 18 year old worker, his arms covered in severe burns, told a reporter, I will go back to work because I have no other option. I'm not literate and I can't find another job. So even though it's dangerous, I have to go back.
- [18:22]
You would think that something like the Mt Ace's explosion would be too big for the shipping industry to ignore a wake up call. That's not what happened. Shipbreaking at Gidani did slow down, but it was only because a more lucrative market opened up in Bangladesh. There the injuries and deaths continued and the conditions deteriorated. That is until one worker decided to risk everything to reveal what was really happening.
- [18:58]
F
Hey basketball fans. Steve Nash here, ready to elevate your basketball IQ? I'm teaming up with LeBron James to to bring you the latest season of Mind the Game. And we're about to take you deeper into basketball than you've ever gone before. We're breaking down the real game, the X's and O's that actually matter. In every episode we'll share elite level strategy, dive into career defining moments and explain the why behind plays that changed a game, a team or a championship. LeBron and I have lived this game at the highest level for decades. We've been in those pressure moments and made those game changing decisions and learned from the greatest basketball minds in history. Now we're pulling back the curtain and sharing that knowledge with you. Time to go beyond the highlights and get into the real heart of basketball. Watch Mind the game now on YouTube prime video or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [19:53]
A
Ankta was just 15 years old when he left his home in northern Bangladesh to find work in the port city of Chattogram. His family had fallen on hard times and he wanted to help.
- [20:07]
D
When I saw that they are going through hardship, then I decided that I should work outside Bogora. And then I came here to Jotugram and joined here in shipbreaking years to.
- [20:20]
A
Protect Tanakhta's identity, we've altered his voice and given him a pseudonymous. Anukta was dazzled by the job at first. He'd never seen the ocean before, let alone one of the massive ships that came into the yards. He stood in awe of them and he liked his co workers, many of whom were teenagers like himself. The pay was only about 60 cents a day, but Anukta signed on. A job was a job. His first role on the yard was to scrub the oil out of the fuel and Storage tanks before the cutter men came in with their blowtorches. Then he'd haul away the heavy scraps of steel out onto the beach. It was grueling, exhausting work.
- [21:00]
D
14 hours, morning till night. They did not give me any safety equipment.
- [21:07]
A
Protection for the workers in the yard was limited at best. Ankhta was injured multiple times on the job.
- [21:14]
D
I fell down from the sheep once and hurt my head, and I also got burned when I was cutting scrap.
- [21:23]
A
But Ankhta needed the work and needed to send money home to his family. So he stayed for the next 27 years.
- [21:34]
For nearly three decades, Anukta remained a loyal worker. He did his job, he sent money back home, and he didn't complain. He had his share of physical injuries, but compared to many of his co workers, he'd been lucky. But then one of his closest friends got sick.
- [21:52]
D
He got a screening of his body, and he has cancer. And it's caused by asbestosis.
- [22:01]
A
Asbestos breaks down easily into tiny fibers which can then be inhaled. The fibers scar lung tissue, leading to coughing, chest pain, and shortness of breath. That's asbestosis. And in severe cases, like in Ankta's friend, asbestosis can lead to lung cancer. At that point, Anucta decided that something had to be done. They couldn't keep working like this, where any of them could fall ill at any moment. So he started advocating for better working conditions and medical care.
- [22:34]
C
There's a group of workers who are suffering from asbestosis, and he's very much an advocate for them.
- [22:40]
A
That's Julia Bleckner, a senior researcher for Human rights watch. She first traveled to Bangladesh in 2011 as an American Fulbright fellow there on other research. But she happened to see one of the ship breaking yards for the first time.
- [22:54]
C
There's these giant ships that look like it's a complete shipwreck on the beach that otherwise would be kind of a beautiful, pristine beach, but there's, you know, chemicals and oil and paint in the water and kids running around barefoot. And then outside of the shipbreaking yards, you know, they're selling everything from the ships. It's like almost apocalyptic looking. It's hard to describe.
- [23:21]
A
That moment changed the trajectory of her life. By 2020, Julia was back in Bangladesh, working for Human rights watch. Over the next few years, she documented conditions in the country's shipbreaking yards. She and her team interviewed dozens of current and former workers. But getting them to talk wasn't always easy.
- [23:43]
C
Gaining trust of workers who, you know, are basically working without actionable contracts and are completely vulnerable to their employers. They were very, very nervous to speak out against the industry. And so developing that trust and ensuring that there wasn't retaliation, that was the number one concern and took a lot of care and time.
- [24:15]
A
But eventually the workers started to warm up to her, and Julia was able to gather information about their work environments, including how much or how little they were paid.
- [24:26]
C
Bangladesh has set a standard for what there's supposed to be a minimum wage for shipbreaking workers. And workers are still paid way below that.
- [24:34]
A
The official minimum wage for a ship cutter, the guys with the blowtorches, was $193 a month. But Julia found that on average, cutters in the yards were paid the equivalent of only about $120 per month. Cutter's helpers earned even less than that, as little as $54 a month. On top of the abysmal pay, some yards were also employing child labor that was illegal. So the shipyard owners would have the kids work night shifts where it was less likely they'd be seen. But that just made the working conditions for the children even more dangerous. And of course, young and old workers alike were still getting injured quite often.
- [25:17]
C
So there was a worker, his name was Massum was the name that we used in the report. A pipe exploded while he was working, taking his ship apart, and he lost his leg. And rather than taking him to the hospital, the shipyard owners just brought him out of the yard and threw him into the bed of a truck. He just described feeling like his. It was just clear that his life didn't matter.
- [25:45]
A
As Julia collected all this information and interviewed workers, she was introduced to Anachta. By then, he had reached his breaking point with life in the shipbreaking yards, and he was ready to do something about it.
- [26:03]
Anukta told Julia that he'd witnessed violence against workers at the shipyards. Julia wasn't surprised to hear that. Back in 2016, guards at a Chattogram shipyard opened fire on demonstrators who were protesting the accidental death of a worker. No one died, but seven were wounded, including a 16 year old boy. The company that owned the yard, Kabir Steel, is the leading steel maker in Bangladesh, and it had a track record of safety accidents. And yet it denied that this specific incident even took place, saying their guards simply fired, quote, warning shots. And like so many of these ship breaking yards, there is no record of the company ever facing any real consequences. But Anukta wanted to see the yard owners and the European shipping companies held accountable. So he landed on an idea. Outsiders were unwelcome at the yards. But as a worker, Anukta could sneak a camera in and capture photos and videos of the working conditions.
- [27:06]
D
I knew I had to use the camera very carefully, because if the owner of the shipyard somehow found out, they would take me for punishment. The owner once put me in detention and then released me.
- [27:24]
A
What do you think they would have done if they'd caught you?
- [27:27]
D
They could put me in detention again. They would have kept me captive for a few hours and released me later. After a few days, the owner would kill me using his gang. Or they could have done something really bad to me later.
- [27:48]
A
Ankhta knew that if he filmed the shipbreaking yard, he was putting his life on the line. But he also knew that nothing was going to change unless the outside world saw with their own eyes what was happening. And the only way to do that was to get it on film. So there could be no doubt about just how bad things were. So one day, Anukta went to work and smuggled in a camera.
- [28:31]
Anukta carefully moves through the shipyard, glancing over his shoulder, making sure that no one notices what he's doing. He holds his camera tight to his body, aiming the lens at his surroundings. Over the course of several days, Anukta captures photos and videos of the reality of life in the shipyards. He shoots video of men hauling huge chunks of steel barefoot through the tidal mudflats. He snaps a picture of a worker perched on two beams inside the ship, balancing as he carves through one of them with a blowtorch. In another photo, a worker stretches out in black sludge, the only place to rest. And over and over again, Anukta captures footage of hulking slabs of ship metal crashing into the ocean, sending up clouds of spray.
- [29:21]
It was a potentially game changing amount of material, and Enukta share all of it with Julia Bleckner. In 2023, Julia published a report for Human Rights Watch titled Trading Lives for Profit. Based on interviews with 45 workers as well as numerous experts. It was an exhaustive account of the brutal conditions in the shipbreaking yards of Chatagram. And Anukta's photos and videos captured from inside the yards were a vital part of it. The report also revealed something galling. It laid out in stark detail how major European shipping companies were in direct violation of an international agreement called the Basel Convention. It prohibits developed countries from shipping their toxic waste to underdeveloped countries.
- [30:09]
C
Bangladesh does not have a toxic waste facility, so Bangladesh does not have the capacity for the downstream management of the most toxic. The largest ships in the world to be dismantled on its shores. So a lot of countries that are bound by the Basel Convention will just lie, get it somewhere where it's not bound by the Basel Convention, and then export the ship to a cash buyer who then sells it to Bangladesh.
- [30:34]
A
Julia's report and Anukta's undercover reporting brought renewed attention to the problems plaguing the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh. Not just over worker safety, but over the industry's environmental impacts as well. According to the report, pollutants from the ships were leaching back into the ocean, which may have wiped out as many as 21 species of fish and crustaceans. The ship breaking beach in Bangladesh is also home to coastal mangrove forests, which shipyard owners have been illegally cutting down, making the coast more vulnerable to erosion and flooding during monsoon season.
- [31:10]
And as bad as the environmental impacts are, the dangers to workers health and safety are even worse.
- [31:20]
It's 11:30am on Saturday, September 7, 2024. The heat in Chattogram is already stifling. Inside the stripped hull of a 21,000 ton oil tanker. About a dozen men crowd into the engine room. They've partially dismantled the ship and they're moving on to cutting up the fuel tank. But as soon as they cut into.
- [31:44]
Explodes, flames rip through the compartment, engulfing the workers. All of them suffer severe burns. One of them has more than 90% of his body scorched, Unlike Masoom, the worker who was thrown in the back of a pickup truck after losing his leg. These these men get airlifted to a burn unit in Dhaka, the capital. Julia Bleckner credits that to Bangladesh's new advisor to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, who had assumed the position after an uprising removed the old government.
- [32:16]
C
She shut down the yard and she ensured that there was an investigation and that the yard couldn't reopen until it was up to standard.
- [32:24]
A
Unfortunately, even with better treatment than most shipbreaking workers get, six of the 12 injured men died. And though the corporation that owned the site had to pay restitution to the workers, it was only roughly $6,000 for each worker killed. That was even less than the victims of the Mt ace's explosion in Gidani received. But under Bangladesh's old government, victims might not have received any compensation at all. Ultimately, the local countries where ships are beached can only do so much. Shipbreaking isn't just a Bangladesh problem or a Pakistan problem. It is a global issue, and fixing it will require global regulation.
- [33:09]
On June 26, 2025, a new set of rules for shipbreaking took effect. The regulations are called the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships. But having a super long and official sounding name doesn't mean things will actually change. To Ingville Jensen, it's just the latest example of the shipping industry greenwashing its shady practices.
- [33:37]
E
The Hong Kong convention clearly accepts beaching, and in our view, there's no way you can sustainably recycle a ship when it's stuck on a tidal mud flat and you have no means of containing an oil spray.
- [33:53]
A
The recent explosion in Bangladesh took place at a yard that was certified as Hong Kong compliant. So clearly the new restrictions alone aren't enough to make a difference. But in an effort to revive its shipbreaking industry, Pakistan recently announced plans to convert 31 shipbreaking yards at Kidani to green Hong Kong compliant facilities by June 2026. Remember, remember Abdul Rahman, the worker who witnessed the oil tanker explosion at Gidani in 2016? Well, he's now a yard manager and he's seeing the transformation firsthand.
- [34:29]
B
Now with the green yards, the oil problem will be solved by building a cement floor. All the work will happen there. Before we would directly start cutting the piece that we would get on the ground. Now, that piece would be washed before cutting. So once it's completely clean of oil, only then will we cut it. With that, the sea pollution will stop and safety regulations will also improve.
- [34:57]
A
Ingville Jensen says that as long as these new yards are truly keeping toxic waste off the beach and out of the water, that is a big step in the right direction.
- [35:07]
E
Ships are built in dry docks, they are maintained in dry docks, and we see no reason why they shouldn't also be dismantled in a dry dock or at a facility that can ensure full containment of all the pollution that can come out of the ship. The solution exists, and it doesn't necessarily need to be super high tech.
- [35:33]
A
The European Union maintains a list of ship recycling facilities worldwide that live up to the standards Engvilde is describing. Currently, there are 26 of them, including one right here in the states in Brownsville, Texas. But the problem with these other yards is that they're expensive to operate, which means ship owners get less money when they sell their ships for scrap. So until regulators close loopholes like third party cash buyers or flags of convenience, the beaches of South Asia will continue to be dumping grounds for old ships. It's tempting just to say those beaches should be shut down altogether. But according to Abdul Rahman, that's not a solution either for thousands of workers in these countries. Shipbreaking may be dirty and dangerous, but it is also steady work. And the workers also recognize it's important work.
- [36:24]
B
I would like to tell the listeners that from the outside our work might seem very difficult to you. We work with huge pieces of steel, but once you see, you'll get a better idea. Those of us who do this work, we have gotten used to it before. The ships that came from foreign lands were fascinating new things for me. I had never seen a massive ship before now. I admire the technology and the design of these marvels. I think of all the people from abroad who had built the ship that I am now breaking. It is a strange feeling.
- [37:07]
A
And if developed countries can be more responsible about cleaning their ships before sending them to places like Pakistan and Bangladesh, maybe future accidents can be avoided. And maybe the ship breaking beaches don't have to be such terrible, toxic places to work. The need for these changes is more urgent than ever. Experts are predicting that the number of ships getting scrapped is going to triple or quadruple in the next five years. Here's Julia A lot of really toxic.
- [37:36]
C
Ships are going out of commission now. They're full of asbestos, they're full of toxic waste and lead and paints. And they're going to go somewhere.
- [37:49]
A
And if nothing changes, young men will continue to flock to these yards in search of a better life, only to find tragedy. Like the boy that Ingville Jensen met early in her career who inspired her to get into this work.
- [38:04]
E
His life had been ruined, right? And by the decision of a European shipping company to just gain most profit out of the end of life vessel rather than recycling it in a way that keeps workers safe.
- [38:29]
A
Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey@wondry.com survey.
- [38:54]
On the next episode of Lawless Planet. Europe's cap and trade system was supposed to reduce carbon emissions. Instead, it opened the floodgates to scammers who fleeced the system and made billions. I spoke with another kind of expert who says that it's probably closer to 10 billion. So this was by far the biggest fraud that Europe had ever seen.
- [39:20]
For today's episode we relied heavily on the Human Rights Watch report Trading Lives for Profit by Julia Bleckner and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's report Horror in Gadani. Lawless Planet is produced by and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum. This episode was written by Alex Burns. Our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Wondery is Andy Herman. Our senior managing producer is Nick Ryan. Our managing producer is Sarah Kenny Corrigan. Our associate producer is Lexi Piri. Sound design by Kyle Randall. Music by Kenny Kuziak. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez. For Frison Sync, voice acting and translations by Shahrukh Waheed and Adam Deal Shock a lot fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our legal counsel is Deb Drews. Executive producers are Marshall Louie and Jenny Lauer. Beckman for Wonder. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.