The ship of a thousand cancers

The Alang ship-breaking yard on the Gujarat coast is fast becoming the world’s biggest toxic dump. Some 40,000 men armed with pitiably primitive tools tear apart the rotting carcasses of condemned ships; they each earn £1 a day, while their employers rake in millions from selling the iron as scrap. And the noxious chemicals the men breathe in as they work will grow more noxious still if the decommissioned French aircraft-carrier Clemenceau, now being towed to Alang, is allowed to beach there. No European country will touch the hulk: it contains 1,000 tonnes of asbestos and vast quantities of cadmium, lead and mercury – a recipe for hundreds of thousands of cancers. Alang represents the ultimate pathology of a pattern of economic growth that poisons people and the environment in the process of voiding its toxic junk. It also betrays the chronically low self-esteem of India’s rulers who have been happy to accept the job, thereby not only overruling agreed international limits on the transport of hazardous waste but India’s own law stipulating that 98% of asbestos must be stripped out before a ship can be beached.