Shipbreaking pollutes Türkiye’s coast despite European cleanup efforts
Lyse Mauvais, Wouter Massink

• Over the past decade, more than 2,000 ships have been dismantled at shipyards in Türkiye’s coastal town of Aliağa, one of the world’s main destinations for decommissioned vessels.
• Locals and environmentalists alike complain of rampant water and air pollution linked to shipbreaking, among other industrial activities.
• Workers’ unions and activists have also called out substandard working conditions at the yards, recording 97 deadly accidents between 2013 and 2022.
• Efforts by the European Union to promote better practices in some yards by allowing them to dismantle European ships have had a mixed effect, according to workers and experts Mongabay interviewed, encouraging some yards to improve practices without solving the pollution problem.

Every day, as dusk settles over the Aegean Sea, small vans ferrying workers homeward bustle in and out of Aliağa, a town nestled against lush, forested hills in the western İzmir province of Türkiye, formerly known as Turkey. Stepping out in oil-streaked overalls after a long day, the workers’ scent blends with the thick industrial haze, a smell alien to outsiders and unnoticed by locals.

Since the 1970s, this historic town near the ancient city of Troy, has become one of Türkiye’s prime industrial hubs, home to oil refineries, a liquefied natural gas plant and iron-steel furnaces. These highly polluting industries have helped transform the area into a notorious hotspot of carcinogenic contamination. But another key culprit lies just out of sight, hidden at the bay’s edge: shipbreaking.

Aliağa is the world’s fourth destination for decaying oil rigs, container carriers and cruise ships. According to the Brussels-based NGO Shipbreaking Platform, at least 2,224 vessels have been dismantled there over the past 15 years, spewing out billions of tons of scrap metal, along with oil from the guts of rusty tankers, old electric wires, asbestos-based insulants and thousands of liters of bilge and ballast water.

Locals know better than to eat the fish caught in Aliağa’s waters, which receive a toxic cocktail of pollution from the shipyards, a fisher and a shipbreaker told Mongabay. “They say even the fish is inedible here because it smells like shipbreaking,” the shipbreaker said. Yet this doesn’t stop people from selling fish in the town’s many seashore restaurants.

A destination for European ships

Despite the area’s dramatic pollution levels, and authorities’ abysmal track record of monitoring it and releasing data, Aliağa became a legal destination for European scrap ships in late 2018, when several of its yards were added to a list of facilities approved by the EC to recycle vessels flagged to EU countries. As of July 2024, the list totals 44 yards, including 11 in Türkiye and one in the U.S.

The decision to include Turkish yards came from Europe favoring a lenient “more carrots than sticks” approach, according to Aslı Odman, a lecturer at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and member of Türkiye’s Health and Safety Labor Watch (İSİG), an umbrella organization of labor rights activists that monitors Aliağa. “Let’s let them in and see how they change,” is how she summarized Europe’s approach. According to Robin des Bois, a French NGO that participated in consultations with the EU at the time, the move was also meant to give shipowners a wider set of acceptable options for recycling, since Turkish yards offer better rates for scrapping than their European counterparts.

Five years onward, the EC maintains that including Turkish yards on this selective list helped raise local industry standards. “The inclusion of Turkish ship recycling yards in the EU list has led to improvements in these facilities and therefore has allowed to mitigate the externalities inherent to the ship recycling and prevent environmental degradation,” EC spokesperson Adalbert Jahnz told Mongabay.

Of the 11 EU-accredited shipyards contacted by Mongabay, only the Avşar Ship Recycling plant, which was accredited in 2020, responded to our queries. “Naturally, there are fundamental differences … between shipyards that are on the EU list and those that are not, especially concerning worker safety and environmental protection,” Avşar project manager Emre Aras said, pointing to workers’ safety equipment and practices around handling hazardous materials as key differences.

On the ground, however, feedback from workers and observers monitoring the industry paints a more nuanced picture. “Since the beginning of EU inspections, there have been improvements in general,” Ekin Sakin, a policy officer at the NGO Shipbreaking Platform in charge of monitoring Turkish yards, told Mongabay. “For example, unannounced inspections started, and following this, we observed that some yards started using floating booms to contain oil at the yards in case of spills.”

“But many things still don’t get checked, and it’s far from providing the same environmental standards as in Europe, because Turkish yards are not even subjected to environmental impact assessments,” Sakin said.
“When there was a spill back in the day, we used to turn the soil upside down to cover the spill or throw it in the sea,” a crane operator who has worked in shipbreaking for 30 years and now works for an EU-listed company told Mongabay. “In my current company, they do things differently. There are no spills outside the ship, not even small ones. Any spill while working inside the ship is immediately cleaned.”

But Berkay, who worked at both EU-accredited and non-EU-accredited yards, described only slight differences between the two. “We used to dump things we found on the ship directly into the sea: toilets, concrete, even wastewater from machinery. If 10 tons go into the sea from an unlicensed company, 5 tons will go into the sea from an EU-licensed company.”

Recent investigations by Turkish and international media highlight severe gaps in the EU accreditation process for Turkish yards. In one case, a yard that had recently been involved in an asbestos exposure scandal was added to the EU list despite a damning NGO report advising against its inclusion. Months later, videos filmed at the same yard showed workers dismantling asbestos plates on a ship without protection.

In line with these earlier investigations, dozens of visuals collected or reviewed by Mongabay show persistent environmental and safety concerns at both EU-accredited and nonaccredited yards. Videos posted on TikTok and other social media over the past three years by a dozen accounts, most of them apparently run by workers at nonaccredited shipyards, show vessels partially submerged during cutting of the hulls. In some clips, cut sections fall directly into the water; in another, a burst pipe releases a bright blue fluid. Aerial shots reveal dust and smoke plumes with workers milling about, many without masks, helmets or protective gear.

Meanwhile, during a visit to the shipbreaking site in October, Mongabay saw the partial remains of a ship at the EU-accredited Leyal Demtaş yard half-dipped in the water. At what appeared to be the EU-accredited Anadolu shipbreaking yard, a worker was fishing next to the partially scrapped, 50-year-old Diamond XI cruise ship.

Scenes like this highlight a serious lack of environmental and worker safety standards, according to Alp Ergör, a former inspector at the yards and currently a public health professor at İzmir’s Dokuz Eylül University. “These are images we would never see in a Dutch or German shipbreaking yard,” Ergör said.

“The way this ship splashes water around the yards is an issue that’s already been flagged by the EU,” Sakin added after watching a Facebook video collected by Mongabay, which shows the Montecruz, a Panama-flagged refrigerated cargo ship, speeding into the shores of the Bereket yard in Aliağa, which is currently seeking EU accreditation. “The water will catch any materials on the floor of the yard and wash it [into the] sea. Instead, yards are supposed to use a pulling system to bring the ships on land, but we see from EU inspection reports that most of these systems have been reported as damaged or lack capacity.”

For Berkay, a 38-year-old former worker at multiple shipbreaking yards, this pervasive pollution isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a threat. Locals say many of Aliağa’s first generation of shipbreakers — including Berkay’s own father — have succumbed to lung diseases, likely due to substandard working conditions. After working for 20 years at the yards, Berkay is now undergoing tests for mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer linked to asbestos exposure. Mongabay anonymized Berkay (a pseudonym), the fisher, shipyard worker and a crane operator interviewed for this story because three of them expressed concern about retaliation by shipyard owners.

Like Berkay, researchers, activists and unionists point fingers at the shipbreaking sector for aggravating contamination in the region. Despite these warnings, the European Union granted Aliağa an official stamp of approval in 2018, when the European Commission (EC) designated multiple yards as acceptable destinations for the shipbreaking of European vessels, as part of a bid to make ship recycling “greener and safer.” Prior to this, many European companies sent their defunct vessels to poorly regulated yards in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan for cheap demolition, in violation of Basel Convention rules governing the export of waste, and this move paved the way for them to legally export their scrap vessels to Aliağa.

Five years on, Aliağa’s endorsement remains contentious. While yard owners and EU officials claim practices have improved, environmental and health concerns still mar Türkiye’s shipbreaking industry.
Aliağa is notorious for having some of the worst air pollution in İzmir province. Locating the roots of this environmental crisis is difficult, as the town is surrounded by several toxic industries. But several studies dating as far back as 1993 highlight the gravity of the situation and underline the shipyards’ considerable contribution to it.

“Pollution of the air, water and soil in Aliağa has reached levels that threaten the region’s quality of life,” Hakan Barçın, an environmentalist and former official of the municipality of Izmir, the provincial capital, who helped draft an environmental assessment for the area in 2022, told Mongabay. The report, which Mongabay reviewed, though it was never made public, highlighted alarming concentrations of various heavy metals in the air, soil and surface water around the shipyards.

These findings align with those of earlier public studies. A 2014 study in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment showed high rates of chromium, silver, zinc, arsenic and lead accumulation in topsoil around Aliağa, with shipbreaking yards among the most contaminated sites. Exposure to these heavy metals can cause internal organ damage, cancer, birth defects and neurodegenerative diseases.

Earlier, a 2012 analysis of sea sediments published in Marine Pollution Bulletin found “highly polluted sediments contaminated with lead, chromium, copper, zinc and nickel.” It confirmed the results of a 2009 study that found leaping mullets (Chelon saliens) caught in the bay were highly exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a highly carcinogenic class of chemical pollutants. These contaminants, which are common in vessels’ metal structures and paint, can be released during the scrapping process or when metals extracted from the ships are melted in iron-steel furnaces.

This widespread contamination has worrisome implications not just for the human residents of Aliağa but for surrounding natural areas. Aliağa is home to a bird sanctuary that hosts hundreds of migratory flamingos each year, and it is located near several river deltas that are considered important wetlands. Among these is the Gediz Delta, a Turkish protected area and Ramsar site where near-threatened Dalmatian pelicans (Pelicanus crispus) breed. The delta hosts 80,000 birds in winter, including 10% of the world’s greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) population. Some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from town is the border of the Chios and Turkish Coast International Marine Mammal Area, an important breeding and pupping area for vulnerable Mediterranean monk seals (Monachus monachus).

No public research has measured how pollution travels from Aliağa’s shores. But the proximity of important natural sites worthy of protection concerns some locals. “At the end of the day, it goes into the sea,” Berkay said of the waste produced in Aliağa. “How much can the sea spread it and break it down?”

Cutting costs, losing lives

According to Jahnz, the EC spokesperson, “ship recycling facilities are subject to thorough assessment for compliance with the criteria set out in the Ship Recycling Regulation before they are included in the EU List. The commission keeps the yards under scrutiny.”

But observers familiar with Aliağa say inspections are insufficient to keep shipyards in check. EU inspections used to be pre-announced to the shipbreaking company. “If they know about the inspection, then they’ll take precautions, set everything up, clean everything and hand out masks and clothing to the workers,” Berkay said.

In 2024, the commission switched to unannounced inspections following the recommendations of several watchdogs. However, observers expressed doubt that these visits are truly without notice, since inspectors often stay in local hotels, which may have ties to yard owners.

Following warnings issued by watchdogs like Shipbreaking Platform, two of Aliağa’s yards were removed from the list in 2022 over safety issues. But such punitive measures remain exceptional. With 22 yards crammed together on roughly 70 hectares (173 acres), it’s almost impossible to disentangle various yards’ responsibility for pollution and incidents.

In addition to the skepticism around the adequacy of supervision and inspections, observers criticized Aliağa’s method of landing ships for disassembly. Rather than being lifted out of the water entirely, ships are rammed into large concrete slopes that line the yards. There, the old vessels are partially hauled out of the water and gutted by workers to remove furniture, wires and nonmetallic items. Then come teams of welders to slice the carcasses into large chunks of metal, which are then lifted out by cranes, dismantled and trucked away to feed iron-steel mills elsewhere in Aliağa.

In theory, gutters carved into the concrete slope should catch any spills before they reach the sea. But the system only works if the drains are properly dug and maintained, liquids collected and treated adequately. Dry docks, a far more sustainable ship dismantling option where ships are lifted entirely out of the water before cutting, have never been established in Aliağa because they require significant investment and slow down the process, according to Ergör, the former shipyard inspector. After all, it is Aliağa’s fast turnover and low prices that make its yards appealing.

“Many things may have changed in ship dismantling, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of time,” Ergör told Mongabay. “If you try to dismantle a large tonnage ship while ensuring worker health, safety and environmental health, it could take months.” Just properly scanning for asbestos contents can take weeks due to the ships’ sheer size, he said.

“A ship that can be dismantled in one year in the Netherlands can be dismantled in three months here because there are no precautions,” Ramis Sağlam, a local journalist for Evrensel, a daily newspaper with close ties to Türkiye’s Labour Party, told Mongabay. “The biggest problem is the lack of supervision, noncompliance with professional conditions and the fact that dangerous inventories are not brought to the forefront enough.”
Aras, of Avşar Ship Recycling, said his shipyard uses inventory reports “to identify the hazardous and nonhazardous materials in the ship and where they are located.” Meanwhile, he said dry docks are currently not an option for Avşar due to limited space and the yard’s land being leased from a government agency until 2026.

“If the number of shipyards decreases and dry docks become necessary, we would want to own the land to justify the investment,” Aras said, adding that this would enable other environmentally friendly investments. “It’s our land, our sea and our people. No one cares more about our land, our sea, our air and our children than we do,” he said.

On the EU side, “the commission recognizes that it is easier for yards operating with dry docks to ensure the protection of the coastal and marine environment against adverse impacts linked to ship recycling activities,” Jahnz said. “At the same time, it is also possible for yards using other methods to comply with the strict requirements under [the] Ship Recycling Regulation.”

Yet, many workers still pay a heavy price for shortcuts taken at Aliağa’s shipyards, one measured not in currency but in life expectancy. Most recently, on Aug. 31, shipyard worker İbrahim Karakaya inhaled gas coming out of a valve he had just opened while dismantling a Norwegian oil rig at a shipyard that had been removed from the EU accredited list in 2022. He died shortly after, survived by four colleagues who were taken to the hospital.

His sudden passing added to a long streak of fatal accidents at Aliağa’s shipyards. İSİG recorded 97 fatalities there between 2013 and 2022, a mortality rate it said was “30 times higher [than] the official worker mortality rate in Türkiye.”

“There are also problems in EU-approved yards in Aliağa because the current EU procedure for approval of ship recycling practices … fails to assess whether yards operate safely and environmentally sound comprehensively,” Sakin said. “Monitoring activities in Aliağa should be more strict and robust — domestically and during the EU inspections.”

Türkiye’s environment and labour ministries did not reply to Mongabay’s request for comment.

with thanks, credit: https://news.mongabay.com/2024/12/shipbreaking-pollutes-turkiyes-coast-despite-european-cleanup-efforts/