Ship Breaking in Bangladesh: Exporting the Asbestos Exposure with no Worker Safety

Ship Breaking means what visually comes to mind: breaking old ships into pieces for disposal or recycling. One of the primary areas in the world that specializes in Ship Breaking is Chittagong Ship Yards in Bangladesh. This link provides a good visual as to how this occurs. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2012/may/06/shipbreaking-yards-chittagong-in-pictures.

As discussed in the link, the workers take about the pieces including asbestos and other toxic materials without any protective clothing. As discussed in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking, this industry is essential to Bangladesh as it recovers about 20% of the metal which the country otherwise requires. Also as discussed in Wikipedia, this work is very labor intensive and one of the most dangerous industries. A good couple of YouTube videos are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4cVGWTzKo8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU0DXdAhdsA.

And U.S. ship owners are among the worst. https://www.ban.org/news/2020/2/4/9hu9e6ipsha32r1td837frek8u3kuq. As stated in the article:

“American offshore giants Diamond Offshore, Rowan Companies, Tidewater and Transocean are amongst the biggest global dumpers exploiting the environments and impoverished work force of South Asia,” said Jim Puckett, Director of the US based Basel Action Network (BAN) a member organization of the NGO Platform. “These owners use foreign flags to hide their dirty work, but our research clearly lays the blame on these US companies, who act in violation of international law and norms.” 

This issue came up this week in a presentation by Steven Kazan in the IMig2021 Convention on Mesothelioma as Steven presented on the anticipated future increase of Mesothelioma and other asbestos related diseases in East Asia. If you are registered for the Convention, please check in for the details. If you are not registered for the convention, then feel free to contact Steven at skazan@kazanlaw.com to get a copy of the slides. Steven is a real pro and one of the best Plaintiff side attorneys in the United States. As importantly, his firm provides significant donations to the research of Mesothelioma treatments and is active with the doctors and researchers in regard to microloans.

To put this into context, one of the iMig2021 presenters this morning went through the history of Mesothelioma with an estimated current yearly world wide death toll of over 38,000 people. Given the 30 to 40 year incubation time, that means that at least 1,500,000 people currently living in this world are ill-fated to die a horrible death from Mesothelioma with no additional exposure; they just don’t know it yet. Add that to other lung cancers, Asbestosis, and other cancers, and the numbers become mind-blowing.

We, the world, need to do something, and exporting our asbestos issues to countries like Bangladesh is not the answer. Although just a small part, Steven Kazan believes that many of the United States bankruptcy trusts for asbestos will provide compensation to Bangladesh based exposure to United States manufactured ships. At least, that is what I got out of the discussion, but I will leave it to Steven to provide the details.

Let me know what you think, either by email to TheAsbestosBlog@gmail.com or by leaving a comment.