GMS, the world’s largest buyer of ships for recycling, has urged the European Commission to approve qualified Indian ship recycling facilities for inclusion in the European list under the European Union Ship Recycling Regulation.

Despite more than 110 Indian yards holding Hong Kong Convention (HKC) Statements of Compliance issued by IACS member classification societies, over 35 formal applications, and at least 10 commission-led inspections and audits, not a single Indian yard has been approved in more than a decade. This is not a failure of standards or verification. It is a failure of political will, said the Dubai-based GMS.

India has dismantled over 8,500 vessels across four decades, recovering more than 67 million tonnes of steel. Alang’s annual recycling capacity — about 4.5 million light displacement tonnes — exceeds the combined capacity of the facilities currently in the European list.

A lifecycle analysis by GMS shows that 75 per cent of the hull steel recycled at Alang is directly re-rolled into plate and beam without energy-intensive melting. This reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 58 per cent, compared with virgin steel production. Indian yards recover more than 98 per cent of all ship materials, GMS said.

Most European facilities melt recovered steel and export scrap to Asia. The environmental narrative presented in Brussels does not align with the underlying carbon arithmetic. The commission’s refusal to list Indian yards is based on the Basel Convention’s Ban Amendment, which restricts hazardous waste exports from OECD to non-OECD countries. The framework predates Indian yards’ current transformation by decades.

“The yards at Alang have retrained thousands of workers, rebuilt infrastructure and achieved one of the lowest lifecycle carbon footprints of any major recycling model globally. The European Commission continues to withhold approval without transparent justification. This undermines the credibility of the EU’s sustainability objectives,” says Kiran Thorat, Trader, GMS.

GMS urges the commission to approve qualified Indian yards without further delay, recognise the HKC as the primary global ship recycling framework, and resolve the Basel–HKC regulatory conflict through facility-level assessments rather than geographic exclusion. According to BIMCO, nearly 15,000 vessels will require recycling by 2032. The European list does not have the capacity for it. Meanwhile, 15,000 direct and 5,00,000 indirect livelihoods depend on India’s recycling ecosystem.

Source: The Hindu Business Line 

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