House of Commons - Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Eighteenth Report

3 Existing legislation and guidelines regulating ship dismantling

19. Another important barrier to safe and responsible ship dismantling is the difficulties faced by national regulators in applying waste law to ships and the problem of enforcing the law.

The Basel Convention

20. The Chamber of Shipping told us that there is very little legislation that directly addresses ship dismantling.[29] There is, though, an international framework for dealing with waste and hazardous wastes in particular: the United Nations Environment Programme Basel Convention on the control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal was adopted in 1989 in response to concerns about hazardous wastes from developed countries being dumped in developing countries. The Convention imposes certain controls on the international movement of hazardous wastes and provides criteria for the environmentally sound management of such wastes.[30]

21. There is disagreement about whether the Basel Convention applies to ships at all. The Chamber of Shipping argued that it was never intended to do so and is inappropriate for application to the shipping industry, saying that the presence of some hazardous materials on board ships that are intended for recycling should not mean that the entire vessel is regarded as hazardous waste.[31] The Environment Agency agreed that the Convention was probably not drawn up with ships in mind:

it is very clear that the original basis of the Basel Convention was to deal with the issues of the transboundary movements of waste that came from a land-based arising and were ending up at some other land-based point of destination.[32]

The Agency told us that applying the Convention's controls to ship recycling was "extremely problematic".[33]

22. Greenpeace accepted that the legal framework for ship recycling is complex and that there are practical difficulties in applying some aspects of waste law to ships. However, it argued that the Basel Convention ought to apply to ships:

of all of the instruments currently in place that impact this issue, the Basel Convention is the only one that is a) legally binding, and b) is in a clear position to actually minimise the export of ships containing hazardous materials to developing countries, and thus is the only instrument well placed to quickly prevent more impoverished workers from being poisoned or otherwise killed from risks associated with hazardous wastes.[34]

23. In 1995 an amendment to the Convention was proposed which would ban hazardous wastes exports for final disposal and recycling from what are known as Annex VII countries (Basel Convention parties that are members of the EU, OECD, Liechtenstein) to non-Annex VII countries (all other parties to the Convention). The amendment has not entered into force: it has to be ratified by three quarters of the parties who accepted it in order to do so. At the time of writing, 49 of 82 parties had ratified the amendment.

The European Community Waste Shipments Regulation

24. The requirements of the Basel Convention are transposed into European law by the European Community Waste Shipments Regulation; in the UK the Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations 1994 give full effect to the Waste Shipments Regulation in the UK. The Regulation also takes account of OECD decisions on wastes destined for recovery (that is, for some sort of re-use or recycling rather than for disposal). The Environment Agency explained that the regulation:

provides for a system of 'prior informed consent' whereby transboundary movements of hazardous waste must be prenotified to, and consented by, the relevant competent authorities. Contracts also have to be in place between the notifier and the consignee with a financial guarantee and insurance to cover foreseeable eventualities, including repatriation of the waste.[35]

25. The European regulation also transposes the as yet unratified amendment to the Basel Convention which forbids the movement of hazardous waste from developed to developing countries.[36]

26. In informal discussions, European Commission officials were clear that the Commission considered that the Basel Convention and the European waste shipment Community Waste Shipments Regulation did apply to ships that the owners intended to dismantle. Since the European Community Waste Shipments Regulation includes a ban on export of hazardous wastes to developing countries, the regulation forbids the export of ships that are classified as hazardous waste to developing countries. We welcome this development.

Enforcing legislation

27. Aside from arguments about the applicability of waste legislation to ships there are clear problems, acknowledged by all our witnesses, in enforcing that legislation. First, there is the vexed question of when a ship becomes waste. The European waste framework directive defines waste as anything that the holder discards or intends to discard.[37] As long as a ship is still seaworthy and the owner has not declared his or her intention to dispose of it, it is very difficult to determine when it could be regarded as waste.[38] It is vital to be able to do this because it is only when a ship is waste that the various national and international waste regulations apply.

28. A second, related, issue is that of which states or bodies have jurisdiction over the ship in order to enforce waste regulations once a ship is deemed to be waste. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency commented on difficulties raised by discrepancies between the ways in which national and international legislation are applied:

a major difficulty lies with the difference in the perceived roles and responsibilities of the state, with … all shipping related legislation being applied through the state only to the state's flagged ships, whilst the Basel Convention would apply to the exporting state—in this case to vessels leaving UK ports regardless of flag or state of ownership … there has been the threat of abandonment of ships following potential detentions under trans-frontier shipment of waste controls in UK ports.[39]

29. National and European law does not apply on the high seas, so there is the possibility that a ship's owner could circumvent waste legislation by delaying the declaration of its intention to dispose of the ship until the vessel had left national waters. The IMO, as a United Nations body, is the only body with the power to regulate ships regardless of where they are registered, docked and dismantled.

30. The Government, as a member of the International Maritime Organisation and in its role as upcoming president of the G8 and the European Union, should work to ensure that the International Maritime Organisation gives priority to producing an internationally binding agreement which sets out how ships should be dismantled. Such an approach must avoid the difficulties associated with the current tortuous arguments which try to determine when a ship becomes waste. We urge the Government to encourage the International Maritime Organisation to concentrate its work on a best practice agreement which applies at the point of dismantling. The Government should seek to ensure that the International Maritime Organisation does not allow itself to be side-tracked into the difficulties of agreements which try to adjudicate on how international waste transfer arrangements affect the way in which ship dismantling is conducted.

Voluntary guidelines

31 In response to the growing concerns about the environmental and health and safety impacts of ship recycling, the IMO adopted guidelines on ship recycling in December 2003.[40] These drew on an earlier industry code of practice produced by the International Chamber of Shipping in conjunction with a number of other shipping organisations.[41]

32. The IMO guidelines set out the roles of the state where the ship is flagged, where it is docked and where it is intended to be recycled as well as those of the commercial bodies involved—the ship owners and dismantling companies.[42] They recommend that each ship should have a 'green passport', which sets out what hazardous materials are on board and where they are. For new ships, this passport should be prepared by the shipbuilder and kept up to date by its owners. For existing ships, ship owners should prepare a passport to the best of their knowledge.

33. The guidelines recommend that, when choosing where to send a ship for recycling, the ship owner should take account of the facility's ability to handle and dispose of hazardous wastes safely and should:

make every effort to minimize the amount of potentially hazardous materials on board the ship [and] continuously seek to minimize hazardous waste generation and retention during the operating life of a ship and at the end of a ship's life.[43]

34. The guidelines also recommend that the ship owner should remove hazardous materials from the ship before sending it for recycling, where this is consistent with the safe operation of the ship.

35. There is some difference of opinion over whether the IMO guidelines should be converted into a binding regulation. The Chamber of Shipping opposed such a conversion, at least for the moment, arguing that, since the guidelines were adopted only recently, it is too early to say how effective a voluntary regime will be and whether it needs the force of law.[44] Both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace argued that an international regulatory framework for ship dismantling was necessary.[45] The Environment Agency and Defra said that, at least, a clearer international agreement about the definition of ships as waste was necessary and that tighter international regulation may also be desirable.[46]

36. Whatever the merits of voluntary or regulatory regimes, there does appear to be an international consensus that the way in which the international waste regime applies to ships needs to be reviewed. To this end, the IMO, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the parties to the Basel Convention have agreed to form a joint working group which will:

act as a platform for consultation, co-ordination and co-operation in relation to the work programme and activities of ILO, IMO and the Conference of Parties to the Basel Convention with regard to issues related to ship recycling.[47]

37. The Minister for Environment and Agri-Environment told us that the working group was a technical, rather than ministerial, group and was not likely to start work until February 2005. He hoped that the United Kingdom would be appointed to the group.[48]

38. Given the international nature of the shipping industry, any action or regulation to address ship dismantling will be effective only if it is agreed at an international level. Furthermore, if an initiative is really to work, it would have to be taken under the aegis of the International Maritime Organisation in order to circumvent the problems associated with ships changing flag and owners declaring their intention to dismantle a vessel only once it is on the high seas.

39. We therefore warmly welcome the decision to form a joint working group of the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention, the International Maritime Organisation and the International Labour Organisation. We urge the Government to ensure that it has meaningful input into the deliberations of the working group. We hope that the working group will clarify when a ship is to be regarded as waste and how best to apply the principles of international waste legislation to those parts of a defunct vessel that cannot be re-used or recycled.

40. We note the Minister's hope that the United Kingdom will be included in the working group and urge the Government to seek to play as active a role as possible in it.

29 Q13 Back

30 162 states have agreed to be bound by the Conventionwww.basel.int: www.basel.int. Back

31 Ev 2 [Chamber of Shipping], Q31 Back

32 Q208 Back

33 Ev 57 [Environment Agency supplementary evidence] Back

34 http://greenpeaceweb.org/shipbreak/analysisinconsistencies.pdf Back

35 Ev 47 [Environment Agency], para 5.3 Back

36 Ev 46 [Environment Agency], para 5.3 Back

37 Council Directive 75/442/EEC on waste, as amended by Council Directive 91/156/EEC Back

38 Qq206, 213, 257 Back

39 Ev 84 [Maritime and Coastguard Agency], paras 25, 29 and see Ev 61 [Defra], para 16 Back

40 Ev 69 [International Maritime Organisation], paras 2-3 Back