David Hughes, Business Times 3 Dec 08;
As an awful lot of containers are filled with rubbish, a report details how much trouble recyclable waste can cause
A COUPLE of publications coming to my attention this week have underlined how different a business liner shipping has become. The first was the British seafarers' union Nautilus UK's journal. Towards the back, there was a picture of a model of the Clan Line general cargo ship Clan Shaw and a write-up of its rather short service life, ending up under a different name on the rocks off Cape Town 16 years after being built.
Now it so happens that the Clan Shaw was an identical sister ship of my first ship as a cadet. Consequently, I took a particular interest in the article and especially the bit on how many crew we used to carry on those ships - the total complement was somewhere over 80. And then I looked at her tonnage - 8,700 gross registered tonnes, perhaps with a lifting capacity of around 14,000 tonnes.
We used to trundle around the European coast taking weeks, sometimes literally months, loading a full cargo before sailing to Africa to discharge and load again in equally leisurely manner.
Of course, it immediately struck home just how far we have come since the Clan Shaw and her ilk.
The Clan Shaw was big and powerful for her day so the fair comparison would be with an 8,000-TEU or 10,000-TEU container ship operating today.
And a modern container ship requires only a fraction of the time in port required by the old conventional cargo ships.
Then I saw a press release about the latest publication from the mutual liability insurer the UK P&I Club. The Perils of Waste Shipments in Freight Containers highlights the problems and summarises the legislative framework surrounding this trade. The club notes, 'There is plenty which can go wrong.'
One passage I found especially interesting. Apparently a vessel loading in the UK for China may carry recyclable waste in up to 65 per cent of its loaded containers.
The new UK Club manual goes into great detail about how much trouble 'recyclable' waste can cause. Partly this because the term is often really a misdeclaration of hazardous rubbish.
The club notes that containers carrying waste shipments can suffer structural damage due to improper stowage practices at the loadout point or become unusable due to tainting from a particular cargo's malodorous properties. Ports may turn down cargoes of contaminated green waste.
Unbalanced loads may cause vehicles to roll over during road transportation.
Shipments may be rejected at the port of discharge due to incorrect or incomplete documentation. Shippers and receivers may fail to take timely and appropriate measures to mitigate problems arising from incidents and may even abandon waste cargo, leaving the container operator to arrange disposal or return the cargo expensively to origin.
The club says that many countries receive hazardous waste as a welcome source of business, with at least 8.5 million tonnes shipped internationally each year. The trans-boundary movements of various wastes and their volumes have increased significantly over the last decade, with recycling the primary spur. Certain types of waste have become more valuable to export, such as electrical and electronic equipment, which is very expensive to recycle or treat in Western Europe.
The main international legislation governing the carriage of waste in containers is the Basel Convention. Negotiated under the United Nations Environment Programme, it was adopted in 1989 and came into force in 1992. It was originally designed to address the uncontrolled movement and dumping of hazardous wastes, including incidents of illegal dumping in developing nations by developed world parties. Among the 170 member countries, Afghanistan, Haiti and the United States have signed but not ratified it.
The Convention regulates the movement across international frontiers of hazardous and other wastes. These include paper, paperboard and paper product wastes, plastic, mixed plastic materials and metal or alloy electrical and electronic assemblies.
Written consent has to be obtained from the states of export, import and transit. The Convention obliges its parties to ensure that hazardous and other wastes are managed and disposed of in an environmentally sound manner. Parties are expected to minimise the generation of waste and the quantities moved across borders, and to treat and dispose of it as close as possible to the place of generation.
Nevertheless, it is clear from the UK Club's new publication that an awful lot of containers hauled around the world on these ultra large, ultra expensive container ships are literally filled with rubbish, and quite often dangerous misdeclared rubbish at that.
So this all makes me wonder just how much progress we have made since the days of the Clan Shaw. She was apparently hopelessly inefficient, but in those days we made good profits for her owner and carried useful goods across the oceans. Can we say the same today?
