Shipbreaking.
The most recent edition of Granta has an arresting cover, one which takes some close examination before you’re convinced: no, that isn’t a false color trick, a Photoshop filter effect, an art director’s whim. (At least, not much.) Those are nickel tailings—waste material from the mining industry: “As ore bodies are extracted the valuable mineral is surrounded by gangue (uneconomic material) that needs to be separated in a concentrating process. Crushing and grinding methods are used to reduce the mined ore to sand and silt sizes, and then the concentrating process can begin. The most common technique used today is ‘flotation’ which has been used to separate minerals since the early 1920s. The process treats the ground ore in a bubbling mixture of water and chemical constituents which the sort metallic minerals stick to and rise to the surface of the flotation tank.” —The river really is that ghastly, gorgeous color. (Just about.)
The photo’s the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer who specializes in industrial landscapes—“the industrial sublime,” he says. The brief article by Noah Richler introducing his gallery inside opens like this:
In 2001, I travelled with Edward Burtynsky to the beaches of Chittagong, in Bangladesh, where many of the world’s old freighters go to die.
He’s talking about shipbreaking.
On his first trip, briefer than he would have liked, he had photographed the Bangladeshi workers cutting up the ships, some as large as 60,000 tons, with little more than hammers, and acetylene torches—remarkable, Lilliputian, work.
I didn’t know shipbreaking existed until I read this introduction. I know a little more, now: the appalling labor conditions, the sheet metal dorms scavenged from ship parts, the constant din, the fumes and chemicals, the waste, the miles of beach churned into sludge. That it will affect England perhaps not as much as it affects India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Viet Nam and China, but still: $17 million to scrap 13 US Navy ships, a bid that undercut American firms despite the expense of towing them across the Atlantic (and the legal battles to determine their seaworthiness). That the second-largest ship ever built, the Sea Giant, 10 storeys high, longer than an Eiffel Tower is tall, was just run aground on the shipbreaking “yards” of Gadani to be whittled by hand into scrap. That the ILO is doing what it can to promote guideines for responsible ship-dismantling, but.
I live in a working port city; there’s four very active terminals loading timber and grain and unloading cars and electronics even as I sit here typing. There’s been some industry up and down the river along the way, and ship construction and ship repair, but nothing so appallingly messy as whittling a disused oil tanker down to scrap by hand. Nonetheless, in December of 2000, the Willamette River was designated a Superfund site.
As he worked with his camera in Chittagong, a line of shipbreaking workers walked past us barefoot in the oily muck. Burtynsky pointed out that the beach was rife with toxic waste.
Just about every day bussing over this bridge or that I can look out and see one of these monster freighters, so big that the crew keeps bicycles to ride from stem to stern. From all over the word, and in every sort of condition. I might give them a second thought from time to time; they’re big, and there’s enough of the kid left in me to marvel at their size, and wonder what it’s like to drive one of those things across the ocean.
Now I know where they go to die, and how.
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
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