Human Cost for Ship Recycling: A Review of Current Occupational Safety and Health Practices in Major Recycling Facilities
Keywords:
Occupational health and safety, Environment-friendly ship recycling, HAZMAT, Hong Kong ConventionAbstract
Research studies on ships and shipbuilding have garnered significant interest worldwide. However, there is a shortage of scientific literature about ship recycling, shipbreaking, and safe-end-of-engineered life (SEEL) ships. The surrounding environment's environmental, health, and occupational safety aspects are particularly integrated with the process of ship dismantling. A plethora of previously published papers illustrated the challenges, opportunities, and advantages of utilizing more environmentally friendly and safer ship scrapping methods, especially for the leading ship recyclers situated in China, Turkey, and South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan). This paper aims to review the existing literature on the occupational health and safety aspects of ship recycling across the aforementioned regions and compare the advances chronologically and regionally to find the research gaps. Through a scoping review using the databases of "Science Direct","Research Gate”, and “Springer”, this study compiles the current scenario of occupational safety standards existing among major ship dismantling destinations - India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, and Turkey for 17 years (2008-2024). To determine the general state of occupational health and safety (OHS) related to shipbreaking and ship recycling research, the most important articles were assessed for the review, and research gaps in hazardous waste management and the efficiency of workers’ training were identified. These findings can be potential avenues for future study that could guide the development of the body of knowledge about SEEL ships and the OHS problems they raise.
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