31 replies
10h4m
One of my previous (job) tasks was to monitor larger vessels, and analyze where they'd end up getting torn apart.
Turns out western shipping companies don't like paying western prices for that kind of work, and try to sneak the vessels down to India, Bangladesh, etc. where that kind of work is much cheaper. But with cheaper prices comes a host of issues, from the environmental effects, to human workers actually performing the dangerous work.
Sometimes these things can fail spectacularly - like when they try to sail or tow the vessel, end up drifting to land, and create huge oil spills.
Well, West should stop dumping their garbage to the rest of the world.
It is easy to have strict environmental regulations, if they are not enforced, and negative externalities are exported.
Actually the export of ships to be wrecked in Asia already is banned under EU law and international treaties - and sometimes, even company owners can and do land in jail for violating them, as it happened to Georg Eide [1].
The difficulty lies in the fact that many ships aren't registered in the EU countries, but in small countries like Antigua who don't have any incentive to help out European countries enforce their laws, and by many ships being legally hidden between layers of shell companies. It can go as far as there being a dedicated LLC in yet another tax haven per ship, and once the ship is to be wrecked, it isn't the ship itself that's being sold for wrecking (because that would be openly illegal and easy to catch and prove for authorities), but the LLC is being sold, and the lax attitude towards audit and public records requirements in the tax havens makes it very difficult to prove illegal intent.
[1] https://www.freitag.de/autoren/julia-lauter/reedereien-lasse...
We could require that ships they dock in EU harbours are owned by countries that are party to some international anti-ship breaking agreement.
But it's a lot of paperwork :)
Still would not prevent just selling the LLC at the end of the ship's useful life.
And I'm not sure how to effectively police that.
Find the names of the people involved, get a warrant and use the full power of that impressive global surveillance system that we've created to fight the global war on terror to surveil them and find evidence of other crimes that they've surely committed and prosecute the fuck out of them for that.
Seems like a lot of work to prevent India from breaking ships it wants to break.
Meaningless statement. You can say the exact same thing about any law.
Not every law tries to regulate the behavior of people in other jurisdictions.
We do live in a world where it's basically impossible to live without violating one law at one time or another (often unknowingly and without malice)
But that might put the EU at an economic disadvantage; it's hubris to believe the rest of the world will bend backwards to meet EU's rules.
I mean they do, see cookie banners/GDPR, Apple, etc, but still. I'm of the unsubstantiated opinion that all the laws make the EU a less desireable market. But that's a policy based on morals instead of economics / relentless capitalism.
Actually, it will. RoHS and the push for standardizing phone connectors ended up influencing the whole world and making it a better place for everyone.
The EU is a sizable market, and unlike the US with its constant elections and government shutdowns, it's politically relatively stable. No one, as said not even Apple, can ignore the demands of the European Union.
The EU has consent elections, it's just a proportional representation forces people to work together to get anything done, so you end up with a lot of relatively uncontroversial work happening. There's also little point in trying to score points as you will never have a majority
The EU parliament is elected every five years, and while most of the member countries elect during the EU parliament term and so it's election year somewhere in the EU every year, national elections usually have negligible impact on the European level (outside of dramatic swings like in Poland or Slovakia between dedicated notorious pro-EU and anti-EU parties).
In contrast, the US re-elects the whole House and 1/3rd of the Senate every two years which means that the House is basically only at peace to work for a year at a time (first half year is spent on getting the newbies up to speed, last half year is filled with campaigning), and if changing control over the Senate is even possible depends on if the states whose seats are up for reelection are considered swing states or not. The entire way the US Congress works is not incentivizing bipartisan legislation, and it's outright hostile to the idea that there could be more than two political parties.
Like the Jones Act [0], it's easy to create unintended consequences.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#...
Reminds me of when I lived on a sailboat. I just bought the LLC that owned it, which always operated at a loss just to keep the ship in working order, which was a tax write off. It even came with accountants who knew how to keep everything in the books “correct.”
To make matters worse, when these ships come under attack or get hijacked, suddenly they want the full backing of Western military forces. Strange they don't call on Panema or Antigua's military forces, since that's where they are registered.
The maritime industry, more than "the West", is a prime culprit there. Let's also mention how they skirt taxation, the use of flags of convenience, the lack of protection for crews, the matrioshka shell companies...
Also the clothes industry!
The clothes brands claim to recycle cotton, but use 3rd party "recycling companies" to ship the textiles to Africa, where they just burn it in huge waste heaps. With huge environmental issues.
https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blog/54589/how-fast-fas...
Computer "recycling" in Lagos/Nigeria is another topic.
A follow up
Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet added a airtags in clothes "recycled" by H&M. Guess where they ended up?
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/jlME1e/aftonbladet-inve...
I’m a bit confused as to how this investigation worked - how can they tell if clothes were ground for fiber with just airtags?
FWIW This is one of the sources, in Swedish though.
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/0QxkyA/modets-morker-5-...
At the end there they list the fate of 10 different garments they returned to H&M.
You can evaluate yourself if you find this environmentally friendly or not.
(This comment was not meant to be snarky although I realize it may look like it. I just did not have time to write a proper comment/translate to the article earlier. See my later answer in the sibling)
Not sure if they did this, but they could fly over a reporter to last place they observed the AirTag and have them look around.
TL;DR
1. They travelled to the location (in Togo).
2. They found the guy who imported the jeans. He was about to try to resell them (along with huge bales of clothes), but most of the clothes are not sold. I dont think recycling was at the top of his mind.
3. The last signal was from a place where they use to make a fire of the clothes.
4. Most of the garments travel around the world as waste - not exactly good for the environment.
The person from H&M responded with whataboutisms. Which is not exactly legit since they use this in marketing.
Edit:formatting
And “magic pipes”!
The trajectory of the last French air carriers - the Foch and the Clémenceau - is a good illustration of the mess it can be, even for former military flagships.
Those military ships are of course full of asbestos - more than usual - and heavy metals.
The Clémenceau was supposed to be dismantled in Spain, but when the marine nationale saw it being towed to Turkey, they cancelled the contract and got it back.
Then another consortium offered to dismantle it in Alang but with special precautions. The boat left, was blocked by NGOs, was blocked by Egypt when it tried to cross Suez, then India refused to accept it. It came back to France after rounding all of Africa.
It was eventually dismantled in the UK, after a few more protests (the river Tess had to be deepened, and the hull had to be cleaned up of any invasive organism)
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9mant%C3%A8lement_du_p...
The Foch was sold to Brazil, and after much of the same drama, was eventually sunk in the Atlantic.
Alang is an interesting place to look at in Google maps. Make sure to check the street views.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Alang,+Gujarat,+India/@21....
Very interesting. I spotted quite a lot of totally enclosed lifeboats along the main street, including what looked like a business selling enclosed lifeboats. I didn't imagine there was a used market for enclosed lifeboats but a google lead me to Alibaba and they go for hundreds to 10s or 1000s of dollars.
I wonder how different each of the wikipedias are between languages. There's barely any info about the dismantling of the Clémenceau in the English wikipedia. I occasionally read the Spanish language wikipedia for South American history as it is more complete. As a someone fluent in both languages I feel like I have access to more knowledge.
How much knowledge is "hidden" in other languages on Wikipedia?
Would be cool for translators to copy portions between languages. They must do this already, right?
For this kind of stuff there is usually much more in the language of origin. I’d suspect the French article have more details on this since it was the French navy.
Merci for sharing this tragic part of French history. I wished budgets on such project included the dismantling of it at the end.