May/June 2004
Take a U.S. scrap recycler, put him on the shipbreaking beach in Alang, India, and the experience is sure to be as moving, enlightening, and perplexing as the place itself.
By Tom Mele
A fleet of ships is run aground along the shoreline, looking like a pod of beached steel whales. From the pilot house of a 60,000-ton oil tanker, I have an excellent view of this six-mile stretch of sand that is unquestionably the world’s largest scrapyard. This is Alang in northwestern India, and it is here where thousands of obsolete ships have been brought over the years for recycling.
The Alang shipbreaking yards are located off the Arabian Sea on the west coast of the Gulf of Cambay. The beach there has some natural features that make it well-suited for cutting up ships. Twice a month—at the full and new moons—the high tide rises 30 feet above normal. Combined with a sandy shelf that extends a quarter mile into the bay, these attributes allow ships to be run aground, leaving them high and dry when the tide ebbs.
Once beached, each vessel is recycled by one of the 72 shipbreaking businesses that operate side by side along the beach. These enterprises, which employ an estimated 15,000 workers, form a veritable city dedicated to scrapping ships. It is quite a sight—and to this scrap veteran, it was my idea of a dream vacation.
Getting There
Alang—located about an hour’s drive southeast from the city of Bhavnagar in the state of Gujarat—is not an easy place to reach. After traveling 30 hours from New York, I grabbed a few hours of sleep in Mumbai (Bombay) then went to the airport at 5 a.m. for the flight to Bhavnagar. Leaving Mumbai airport, the plane cut through the smog and arced over the Arabian Sea, heading northwest for a smooth one-hour flight.
Descending toward our destination, we banked over shallow, muddy salt flats before landing at the scrubby Bhavnagar airport. Upon deplaning into 100-degree heat, I immediately searched for my sunglasses and bought a bottle of water. Ignoring the indecipherable Gujarati signs and the hordes of persistent porters, I went out to find a taxi.
Since I was the sole cab fare on this Sunday morning, a fight broke out between two taxi drivers to see who’d drive me into town. I chose the one with the lowest fare—only 10 times the going rate—which prompted the loser to whack our vehicle with a tire iron as we pulled away.
My destination was the main hotel in Bhavnagar—the Nilambag Palace Hotel, which is indeed an old maharajah’s palace. This regal domicile was built in the 1850s by English architect Sir William Emmerson and has not been repaired since. Dusty stuffed tigers and royal portraits remain in the foyer as reminders of the former royal occupants. The current Maharajah Singh lives on the grounds and appears more like a suburban soccer dad than a member of faded royalty. All in all, the place had some character, even if people kept walking into my room at odd hours.
Though the shipbreaking operations were closed on Sunday, it was still early so I decided to go have a look at the place. For half the cost of my 10-minute ride from the airport, I found a driver to make the one-hour trip to the coast. It was not a drive for the faint of heart. The tarmac road had two narrow lanes with no shoulders and a sandy drop-off on each side. The roadway was shared by pedestrians, dogs, motor scooters, tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws), bullock carts, cars, buses, overloaded trucks, and the ubiquitous Brahma cows. The experience was like being inside some kind of real-world video driving game. Within that mix is an inviolable pecking order of size and speed that dictates who overtakes whom on the next blind corner. When you add in the heat, dust, diesel exhaust, incessant honking, and unfamiliar (to me) left-side driving, I found it best to ride with my head in the glove compartment.
The first indication that we were approaching Alang was a gigantic diesel engine, looking a bit out of place in the middle of a cornfield. Soon, other marine artifacts appeared along the roadside, including a dozen orange lifeboats, mountains of fluorescent life jackets, and stacks of cabin doors. For the next two miles, the road was lined on both sides with large yards specializing in materials and objects found on large ships—sinks, kitchen equipment, china, curtains, glass, wood, mattresses, engines, generators, cleaning supplies, hydraulic oil, and paint.
As we approached the beach, I spotted the top of a freighter on the horizon. Unfortunately, the main road was blocked by a guardhouse. The guard informed us that entry was restricted. He told me to return on Monday when I could apply for permission to enter the beach area. The guard then handed me a document that outlined in English the fees and permissions needed for “tourists” to visit the shipbreaking yards. These included a $25 admission fee and a $100-a-day license for a video camera. All levies were payable in U.S. funds to the harbormaster, who still reserved the right of refusal. An offer to pay the admission fee directly to the guard, in cash, did not produce the desired result. Resigned to come back in the morning—when I did, in fact, have a proper invitation—I decided to spend the afternoon exploring the nearby market.
In addition to the maritime items on offer, the market had a sizable food bazaar on Sunday, when the workers have their day off. Approximately 15,000 men work in Alang, with the majority living in the workers’ colony that surrounds the beach. As I walked around in the scorching sun, I attracted a sizable crowd. Everyone was curious to know where I was from and what was I doing in Alang. Despite the humble surroundings, there was no lack of hospitality. People offered me numerous cups of tea, soft drinks, pan (a mouth-reddening mixture of betel leaf and areca nut), and strong local cigarettes called bidis. Since I was a bit of a curiosity, I answered far more questions than I asked, yet I still managed to discern some information about working in Alang.
Many of the workers, I learned, were from the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. They had all come to Alang for the relatively lucrative jobs, which pay double that of most industrial jobs in India and triple the national average of $45 a month. Laborers commonly work six days a week, 10 hours a day, earning 200 to 250 Indian rupees a day (about $4 to $5), with occasional bonuses for dismantling a vessel ahead of schedule. The six-day workweek seemed popular since the workers are paid by the day and since most are far from home, with little else to do but work. Many of the workers supported sizable families on their earnings. When I mentioned the 40-hour-workweek and time-and-a-half overtime pay in the United States, the Alang workers thought those sounded like great concepts, and I quickly had many volunteers to work at my firm’s plant in New Jersey.
During my time in the market, I also learned that within the work camp most of the laborers share a shack with other men who speak their language and who are often from the same hometown. In the scrapyards, a form of Hindi has developed as an industrial Esperanto—a necessity given that India has about 18 recognized national languages and countless local dialects.
My driver eventually tracked me down and insisted that we get on the road before nightfall. Considering the trip down, that seemed prudent. So I called it a day and went back to soak in the maharajah’s swimming pool.
On the Beach
My second day at Alang was an entirely different experience. My Indian host picked me up in a new Korean sedan, and we rode to the beach in about a half hour. There, we swept past the guardhouse with a wave and paused at the 10-foot-tall iron gates of a large shipbreaking yard.
As the gates opened, I caught my first glimpse of the beach and saw a container ship—or, more accurately, half a container ship—blocking the horizon. Now, a ship in the water is an impressive enough sight, but a ship out of water is overwhelming. Only then do you get to see the ship’s additional 30 to 80 feet of height that is usually submerged. As we entered the yard, I got a better view and could see dozens of vessels on both sides of the container ship. I caught a familiar whiff of torchcut steel and burnt paint. Cable cranes loaded large sections of steel plate into beefy straight trucks. Sparks sprayed from torches cutting the boats out on the sand.
According to my host, there were 62 vessels in various states of disassembly up and down the beach. As he explained, the six-mile-long beach is divided into about 150 plots, each measuring about 250 feet wide. Currently, there are 72 independent shipbreaking companies—primarily family-owned and -operated businesses—working side by side along this stretch.
Though the Alang operators have their personal and competitive differences, they are all united in the Gujarat Ship-Breakers Association. This association is well aware of the negative public perception of shipbreaking activities at Alang—mostly based on alleged worker abuses and environmental degradation—and the group has worked hard to counter the heavy criticism. Owners also use the association to address collective worker safety and health issues.
While working conditions at Alang certainly fall short of Western standards, I found that they were not the industrial nightmare portrayed in many articles and photos. The beach—which I expected to be flooded with oil and littered with asbestos—was relatively clean. The workers I saw all wore heavy shoes. The torchcutters had eye protection and most wore bandanas across their faces to shield themselves from fumes. There were plenty of safety signs (though I was a little skeptical since most were in English). Despite these safeguards, there’s no denying that shipbreaking remains a dangerous business, with both owners and workers agreeing that there are about 50 fatalities a year at Alang.
As my surprise and awe over the scale of these recycling operations wore off, I began to notice the order within the apparent chaos. Large diesel-driven winches—undoubtedly scavenged from the decks of ships—stood at opposite corners of the shipbreaking plot and did all the heavy work. The cable from one winch was amplified by a four-pulley block-and-tackle. The end pulley was attached to an old Ukrainian passenger ship lodged in the sand a few hundred feet offshore. Because of its deep-keeled bottom, this was as close as the ship could get under its own power. When the next high tide arrived, this 10,000-ton boat would be dragged the last few hundred feet to the beach. Once a boat is beached, it is usually dissected from the bow to the stern, being winched forward as work progresses.
Locally manufactured cable cranes, positioned safely back from the tide, hauled pieces of cut steel up the beach from the waterline. While I watched, the hull was being cut into 6-by-8-foot sheets, each of which had a hole cut in it so it could be lassoed by a crane and loaded onto a truck. All the cranes appeared to be cable-operated rather than hydraulic, and there were no lifting magnets in sight.
Back toward the rear of the yard, recovered ferrous scrap was in carefully sorted piles of plate and beams. Nonferrous scrap was piled under a shed where workers cut and sorted copper, brass, and stainless into distinct piles. Sorted nonferrous grades are stored in a locked warehouse to prevent theft. Despite their staggering metal content, an average ship yields only 1 or 2 percent nonferrous scrap, including the bronze screws (propellers to you landlubbers). The real business here is steel.
At the time of my visit (October 2003), a 10,000-ton ship cost about 90 million rupees (more than $2 million), which translated to $235 to $250 per light displacement ton (LDT), with prices kept competitive by shipbreaking yards in nearby Pakistan and Bangladesh. Given these high per-ton prices, you can bet that most of Alang’s ferrous scrap ends up being rerolled rather than melted—and rerolling mills are indeed clustered around the beach. A few of the more successful shipbreakers, in fact, have vertically integrated into the rerolling business and now feed their own mills.
In these operations, steel plate is cut into manageable sizes and used as billet to make rebar and flat products. Some of the rerolling operations are large enough to use the beams and even the anchors as raw material. Thus, instead of supplying scrap to India’s steel mills, the Alang yards compete with them in low-end steel products. Large Indian integrated mills are politically powerful, however, which can create problems for the Alang operators. Also, the U.S. Section 201 measures prompted the larger Indian steel producers to turn to the domestic market and compete harder for the low-end business. Also, the high price of ship scrap and competitive prices for sponge iron have cut into the rerolled products market, forcing a number of local operations to close.
View From a Ghost Ship
Surveying the ships on the beach, I noticed that they came from all over the globe. A few more were anchored out on the horizon, awaiting the next high tide. When the tide arrives, buyers go out to inspect their purchases and finalize the deal. After inspection and final agreement on the price, the buyer telephones his bank and releases the funds. When the seller receives confirmation of payment, the boat is given a heading by the harbormaster. At five kilometers from shore, the vessel is officially in Indian waters and title changes hands. Often flying the Indian flag, the ship is then steered at top speed for its assigned patch of beach. The harbormaster guides the boat in by radio. Once the ship is run aground, its engines are turned off for the last time. Members of the crew wait for the tide to recede then climb down a rope ladder and walk ashore. This process is repeated some 200 times a year.
During my visit, a 60,000-ton oil tanker—reportedly the largest boat ever scrapped at Alang—had just arrived and was run right up onto the sand. This vessel, which measured about a thousand feet long and 80 feet wide, rose at least 10 stories from sand to deck. Standing next to the hull, I felt like an ant next to a watermelon.
My host offered me a tour of the ship, and he didn’t have to ask twice. After donning gloves, we climbed up a short ladder and entered through a hole cut in the bow. From there we climbed another ladder that was lashed to a crossbeam 20 feet above us. I remarked that there was no smell of oil and was told that we were passing through a hold usually filled with water as ballast. Further up, we crossed a beam and began climbing a series of steps welded to the inside of the hold. The huge, dark open space had the size and feel of a steel cathedral. Holes cut in the hull admitted shafts of sunlight as well as a welcome breeze in the warm enclosure.
After scaling about 20 ladders, we passed through a watertight door and emerged, squinting, onto the main deck, which was covered with a maze of pipes and valves. At the aft end was an additional five-story structure that contained the bridge and crew’s quarters. As we walked toward that structure, I looked off the starboard side and noticed an old cruise ship down the beach. Much of its hull had been removed, exposing a few hundred state rooms to the noonday sun. It looked like one of those cross-section diagrams you see in cruise brochures. At the back of the cruise ship, a huge diesel engine was being lowered slowly onto a sled so it could be winched up the beach. Beyond that, a propeller was being cut down to transportable chunks.
When we reached the back of our ship, we had to climb a few more flights of stairs to reach the bridge. It was exactly as the crew had left it. A half-filled cup of coffee sat on the chart table, and the engine telegraph was pulled back to its final engines-off position. It was eerie, like a ghost ship with all the charts, flags, and logs still in place.
Out on the catwalk, the view was incredible. I could see dozens of vessels in both directions—freighters, ferries, tankers, cargo ships, military patrol boats, and cruise ships in various states of demolition. Together, these beached ships represented at least $120 million in ferrous scrap, I figured.
Our trip back down the many stairs and ladders was uneventful but a little slower than the climb up. En route, my host estimated that it would take 12 months to cut up this huge ship. The purchase of a vessel, he noted, is usually financed by a short-term note from a bank. The revenue from scrap sales is then paid directly to the bank until the principal is paid off. The owner usually has to finance the expenses and labor up to that point. The sale of salvageable items like lifeboats, nonferrous metals, generator sets, and accessories helps with cash flow. The bonus of a few thousand gallons of bunker fuel pumped from the hold of this tanker might cover the first month’s expenses.
Curious how one would attack such a massive recycling project, I asked about the normal shipbreaking sequence. Time, I was told, was the enemy. The first task would be to strip all the interior fittings and nonferrous items so workers could begin salvaging the steel. Specialists are usually brought in to remove the kitchens, furnishings, windows, and wood flooring. On a smaller vessel, this can sometimes be accomplished in under a week, with time being more important than price. Next, the generators, engines, shafts, and propeller are removed. Then, with the back of the boat substantially lighter, it is floated and winched higher up the beach with the next high tide. The cutting of the steel varies depending on the type and structure of the ship, though it usually starts in the bow, allowing workers to cut on dry land within the cranes’ reach. As the steel is removed, the boat is winched in and basically cut up in sections like a giant loaf of bread. When the last of the keel is processed, another boat is usually waiting offshore to take its place—and the shipbreaking cycle continues.
As I headed to the airport before dawn the next morning, I reflected on my misconceptions about India’s scrap metal business. I have visited enough Third World scrap operations to know that worker health as well as environmental and safety concerns are entirely at the discretion of the management. Yet in Alang I found sophisticated multimillion-dollar operations that relied as much on machine power as human labor. There are just so many contradictions and imponderables in this complex culture.
Staring out the taxi window, I saw rows of people sleeping on the sidewalk. As we waited for the light to change, I was enjoying the predawn breeze through the open cab window when a cell phone rang. I instinctively reached for my pocket before remembering that my phone was back home, 12,000 miles away. Then I saw a homeless man roll over and prop himself up. He reached into his dhoti, pulled out a chirping cell phone, and flipped it open. He sat on his blanket, merrily chatting away, as the cab lurched forward. Then and there, I realized that modern India is neither Third World nor First, but some crazy hybrid—and I was just too tired to figure it out.
Tom Mele is a co-owner of Connecticut Metal Industries Inc. (Monroe, Conn.).
Take a U.S. scrap recycler, put him on the shipbreaking beach in Alang, India, and the experience is sure to be as moving, enlightening, and perplexing as the place itself.