NYK sends end-of-life ship for green recycling to Bangladesh

In early March, Japanese shipping major NYK sent one of its vessels to PHP Ship Recycling Facility in Bangladesh for green recycling.

The company said that PHP Ship Recycling Facility, which is a ship-recycling facility operated by PHP Ship Breaking and Recycling Industries Ltd., has become the first yard in Bangladesh to be certified by NYK as compliant with the company’s environmental, safety, and human rights standards. The yard has already secured compliance with the Hong Kong Convention on safe and environmentally sound recycling of ships.

The vessel in question is believed to be Panama-flagged general cargo ship KAMO, built in 1998.

“The NYK Group sends supervisors to yards that have been certified by classification societies to confirm that the yards also meet NYK’s stricter standards. NYK conducts ship recycling at these certified yards, which currently total 30 in India, three in China, and one in Turkey. During the vessel dismantling at PHP Ship Recycling Facility, a supervisor sent from our group’s ship-management company monitors the process,” the company said.

Meanwhile, GMS announced that a second ship recycling has been certified as compliant with the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) guidelines for the Hong Kong Convention (HKC).

The S.N. Corporation’s Unit-02 ship recycling yard at Shitalpur, Sitakunda in Bangladesh was certified by the Japanese classification society Nippon Kaiji Kyokai (ClassNK), establishing that S.N. Corporation was capable of the intensive procedural and performance standards required under the HKC.

The IMO Guidelines offer a technical standard to assist in the early implementation of the HKC, with advice on how yards can achieve compliance such that ship recycling does not pose any unnecessary risks to human health/safety and the environment.

Although the convention is yet to be ratified, ship recycling yard operators have begun undertaking voluntary certification.

Bangladesh is among the top three developing nations in South Asia, next to India and Pakistan, where the majority of the world’s ships end up being dismantled.

Being such as important part of the ship-recycling eco-system the country seems to be upping its game on environmental standards amid growing demand for sustainable practices in this sector which has been notorious for safety violations that often resulted in fatalities.

The South Asian shipbreaking yards remained the preferred destination for end-of-life vessels in 2022, dismantling 80% of the global end-of-life gross tonnage, despite their practices of dirty and dangerous breaking on tidal beaches.