After the Chinese government decided to stop the import of end-of-life ships for scrapping, the shipping industry believes that there will not be enough recycling capacity.

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform said that the industry is of the opinion that there will be too few options for them under the EU list of approved recycling facilities.

All vessels sailing under an EU flag will eventually be required to use an approved ship recycling facility, once the EU Ship Recycling Regulation comes into effect on December 31, 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). The European Community Shipowners’ Associations (ECSA) said that this is far from the 2.5 million LDT mentioned in the Regulation.

Therefore, the shipping industry claimed that the standard set by the EU must be lowered so that beaching yards can be approved.

“We only have another six months to go before the regulation will come to 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,” Martin Dorsman, ECSA Secretary General, said.

However, the NGO Shipbreaking Platform explained that there are still other facilities outside the EU, as well as those operating in Italy and Norway, which are expected to be included on the list before the application of the Ship Recycling Regulation.

“As much as it is a pity that the Chinese yards who have already made efforts to be included on the list may now no longer be receiving EU-flagged ships for recycling, the Platform has calculated that the facilities which are currently on the list, the 21 EU-based ones only, are in fact sufficient to recycle the entire EU-flagged fleet at end-of-life,” the NGO Shipbreaking Platform added.

“Indian beaching yards that have applied to be on the EU list will not be included as there is no way for these yards to comply with the requirements of the Regulation as long as ships are beached,” the Platform concluded.

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