European Shipowners Highlight Need To Have Sufficient Capacity On Ship Recycling Yards List

All vessels sailing under an EU flag will eventually be required to use an approved ship recycling facility, once the EU Ship Recycling Regulation effectively applies. This will be on 31 December 2018.

The current edition of the EU list of approved ship recycling facilities only features yards situated in Europe and has a capacity of around 300.000 light displacement tonnes (LDT). It is far away from the 2.5 million LDT mentioned in the Regulation. In the past, all European co-legislators agreed upon this figure: the EU Parliament, the EU Council and the EU Commission. It is based on international research and studies carried out to back the Commission’s legislative proposal in 2012.

“ECSA finds these figures generally reflecting the reality”, ECSA Secretary General Martin Dorsman said.

“For ECSA, this demonstrates clearly that only when third country ship recycling yards will get EU recognition and added to the list, there will be sufficient capacity. This is a message we have tried to pass on to the European Commission – for the moment, the yards on that list will not be able to respond to the recycling capacity demand”, said ECSA Secretary General Martin Dorsman.

“We only have another six months to go before the regulation will come into effect and oblige the European flagged ships to be dismantled in the facilities on the EU list. There is no time to waste but new, also outside-EU, yards that comply with the EU Regulation should urgently be accepted on the list”, he concluded.

On Monday 18 June the EU Member States’ experts on ship recycling met in Brussels to discuss the current situation. ECSA shared its experience with the EU legislators regarding the continuous progress which is taking place today in several Indian Ship Recycling Facilities. One of the most important drivers for the improvements in the Indian facilities is, in fact, their ambition to work towards approval and inclusion in the EU list of facilities. An important tool in that process is technical cooperation on the ground and a close monitoring of the recycling process, wherever the ship recycling facility is located for that matter.

Press Release: ecsa.eu