GMS Argues for Danish Stance on Beaching
GMS, leading buyer of ships for recycling, has come out in support of statemens made by the Danish Shipowners’ Association (DSA) which refuses to ban beaching outright following the recent announcement by their Norwegian counterparts. GMS supports DSA’s position that ship recycling choice shouldn’t be based just on geography.
A delegation from the DSA recently visited ship yards in Alang, India, to see how some had upgraded their facilities to comply with the Hong Kong Convention on ship recycling. The DSA believes it is important that the market makes a distinction between those yards which use beaching and comply with the Hong Kong convention and those that do not.
GMS agrees and also feels that owners who simply decide where to recycle ships based on secondary (mis)information and geographical location do a disservice to their stakeholders and the industry. Often these decisions are made on perceptions rather than reality; political pressures rather than economic facts; irrational exuberance rather than pragmatic evaluations, said GMS in a statement. Simply throwing money does not make ship recycling green. On the contrary, it’s likely to reward inefficiencies and “fear mongering.”
GMS urges the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association (NSA) to see for themselves the improvements that have been made by some of the shipyards in Alang and is happy to extend an open invitation to members from the NSA to visit these yards so they can make their own minds up about beaching at specific yards just as the DSA has done.
Dr Anil Sharma founder and CEO of GMS said: “Yet again there is a lot of misinformation in the press regarding beaching and the Hong Kong Convention. It has been implied in certain trade press articles that the Hong Kong Convention on ship recycling bans beaching and this is untrue.
“Many of the ship yards in Alang have made vast improvements to comply with the Hong Kong Convention so declaring blanket bans on beaching without viewing individual upgraded sites does nothing to encourage other yards in the Asian sub-continent to improve their standards or persuade governments in the region to ratify the Hong Kong Convention. It is also interesting to note that negative stories or negative comments are generally made by people who have either never visited the yards in India or not visited them recently. On the other hand, those who have visited recently have made positive comments such as the DSA and the Japanese Shipowners Association.”