Julio Godoy
PARIS, Jun 19 2006 (IPS) – The asbestos-laden French ship Clemenceau continues to provoke controversy, after being at the heart of an international debate on how and where so-called end-of-life ships should be dismantled.
The Clemenceau, a former French military aircraft carrier, which contains some 100 tonnes of the cancer-provoking asbestos, was supposed to be broken down at a naval yard in Alang, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. From Jan. 1 to Feb. 15, the ship was towed from the French port of Toulon to the Indian Ocean, and was expected to be docked in Alang by late February.
But a legal battle between French environmental and health activists, who claimed that the disposal of the ship s asbestos could not be carried out in India without putting the health of the Alang yard workers and the local environment at risk, and the government in Paris, which argued otherwise, stopped the Clemenceau s journey to the Indian scrap yard.
While the French government claimed that the dismantling of the Clemenceau in Alang would involve training and regular health checks for the Indian workers, and thus constituted an exemplary agreement , international organisations such as Greenpeace and Ban Asbestos, a France-based association of victims of asbestos, denounced the appalling working conditions in the South Asian naval yards.
Greenpeace and Ban Asbestos also affirmed that the Clemenceau s export to India violated international norms on the disposal of toxic waste, as stated in the United Nations Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.
The Basel Convention, adopted on Mar. 22, 1989, orders industrialised countries to decontaminate polluted ships before they are exported to scrap yards in developing countries.
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On Feb 14, the French State Council the country s highest administrative court upheld the claims of Greenpeace and Ban Asbestos. On Feb. 15, President Jacques Chirac ordered the ship to return to France.
On the issue of dismantling ships, which poses global questions related to protection of the environment, France must act in the most exemplary manner, said Chirac.
Now the Clemenceau is anchored in the French Atlantic port city of Brest, waiting to be broken down into scrap metal. But the question of how the asbestos should be disposed of has still not been answered.
After a new inspection to establish the amount of asbestos contained in the ship, to be carried out by the end of this month, the French government will issue a call for tender next fall, restricted to European firms that specialise in disposing of asbestos.
Francis Vallat, president of the Institut Français de la Mer, a public research centre on marine economics, said The best way of dealing with the Clemenceau is to wait for the adoption of new international health and labour standards on the disposal of end-of-life ships, and then send it back to Alang.
The French environmental organisation Robin des bois agrees. Its president, Jacky Bonnemains, even accuses Greenpeace and Ban Asbestos of having blocked the correct solution to the problem.
Vallat told IPS that the question of the dismantling of decommissioned ships requires a global answer. More than one million people work in the naval yards of India, Indonesia and Bangladesh. But we need to improve their working conditions, he said.
Discussions in this sense are under way at the International Maritime Organisation, the U.N. agency that promotes cooperation among governments and the shipping industry to improve maritime safety and prevent pollution from ships.
The International Labour Organisation and the Basel Convention secretariat are taking part in these debates, which are expected to be closed by 2009.
But new compulsory regulations on the disposal of end-of-life ships are needed right now, because every year some 600 to 700 large sea vessels are taken out of service and towed to scrap yards in Asia that do not comply with international norms, Yannick Jadot, an anti-asbestos activist at Greenpeace France, told IPS.
Most of these ships contain highly toxic materials, like asbestos. Due to its resistance to heat, asbestos was considered until the late 1970s to be the wonder material that would prevent fires in the ships engines.
According to World Health Organisation figures, asbestos-related diseases kill some 100,000 people a year. The material has been forbidden in almost all European Union member countries, and in Argentina, Australia, Chile, Croatia, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia and Switzerland.
Asbestos is still commonly found in older homes, in pipe and furnace insulation materials, asbestos shingles, millboard, textured paints and other coating materials, and floor tiles. It is also found in practically all ships built before the early 1980s.
The SS France, a decommissioned cruise-liner sold to a Malaysian scrap merchant last January, is expected to be broken down in the naval yard of Alang. According to Greenpeace, it contains up to 1,250 tonnes of asbestos.
On Jun. 5, India s Supreme Court authorised the SS France, also known as SS Norway and SS Blue Lady, to enter into Indian territorial waters and to dock in Alang. A committee of Indian experts is to inspect the ship, to establish the nature and quantity of the toxic materials it contains.
Once the inspection has been carried out, the Indian government shall decide whether to authorise the dismantling of the ship.
We expect the Indian government to respect international labour and environmental norms, and to refuse the dismantling of such ships under the present working conditions in its naval yards, Jadot told IPS.
The Greenpeace activist said the SS France not only contains asbestos, but also a number of other globally-banned toxic materials, including the carcinogenic polychlorinate biphenyis. For that reason, the government of Bangladesh recently refused the SS France access to its waters, Jadot recalled.
Because of the case of the Clemenceau, there is a new international awareness on the dangers represented by the dismantling of polluted ships in developing countries, he said.
The Clemenceau was the symbol of toxic trade abuse between the industrialised and developing countries, Jadot added. A symbol that has yet to be transformed into compulsory rules, he noted.
