Ship recycling: where ships go to die

A merchant ship is, in the end, a very large quantity of high-grade steel that happens to float. When it can no longer earn — typically after twenty to thirty years — it is sold for its scrap value and dismantled, and the steel is rolled back into rebar and new plate. That part is genuinely circular. The controversy is entirely about where and how.

According to the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, 409 ocean-going ships and offshore units were broken up in 2024. Of those, 255 went to the yards of South Asia, and because the vessels sent there skew large, those 255 hulls accounted for more than 80% of all the gross tonnage recycled that year. The world's ships, in other words, overwhelmingly die on three coastlines.

The three beaches

South Asian recycling is concentrated in three places, in this order of activity:

Rank	Country	Main yard
1	Bangladesh	Chattogram (Chittagong)
2	India	Alang
3	Pakistan	Gadani

These yards win the tonnage for a simple reason: they pay the most per tonne of steel, and they do so because their cost base — labour, land, environmental and safety compliance — is the lowest. The dominant method is beaching: a vessel is run aground at high tide and then dismantled by hand crews with cutting torches as the tide recedes, with no dry dock or impermeable containment beneath it.

The world's fleet is recycled, but most of it is recycled on a beach — and the steel is the easy part to account for. NGO Shipbreaking Platform, 2024 figures

Why beaching is the controversy

Beaching is cheap precisely because it externalises cost. Workers cut apart structures laced with asbestos, heavy metals and residual oils on an open tidal flat; injuries and fatalities are routinely reported, and contaminants reach the intertidal zone directly. This is why the practice draws sustained criticism from labour and environmental groups, and why a regulatory framework has grown up around it — the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, which entered into force on 26 June 2025, sets requirements for an Inventory of Hazardous Materials and approved recycling facilities.

The flag at the very end

There is a quiet pattern at the end of a ship's life that ties this back to the rest of maritime intelligence. Vessels heading for scrap often make a final voyage under a flag they have only just adopted — a so-called last-voyage flag — bought from a small registry that does not require the ship to be recycled at an approved yard. The hull may have spent its life under a major register and then reflag once, for the trip to the beach. As with the shadow fleet, the move is a way to slip a regulatory net, and as always it is the IMO number — not the flag or the name — that lets you follow the same hull through it.

Following a ship to the end

The greying of the world fleet means the recycling pipeline matters more, not less. As we cover in the ageing tanker fleet, sanctions have kept a generation of old hulls trading past their usual scrapping age — which only defers the day they reach Alang, Gadani or Chattogram. When that day comes, the change of status follows the ship's permanent identifier. In the Marifest registry, every record is keyed to the IMO number, so a vessel's identity, flag history and final fate stay attached to one fixed key from launch to last voyage — the same anchor the compliance screen uses to match a hull against the OFAC, EU, UN and UK lists.