Banned wagon: global
A weeldy survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade Teesside waste-management company AbleUK has won a £10.8 million contract to dismantle 13 US navy ships at its yard near Hartlepool, raising fears that these 'toxic rustbuckets' will leak 'deadly pollution' into the sea. The most vociferous opposition is coming not from the North-East, where the first two ships will shortly be arriving, but from Virginia, where they have been kept at anchor for the past 13 years. 'They're leaking and listing, and that's just sitting at anchor in a river,' says Tim Mullane of the Virginian shipyard Dominian Marine. 'If they get to sea, they will definitely start to break up. A pollution slick will follow them all the way across the Atlantic.'
Michael Town of the local dockers' union, the Sierra Club, is likewise so worried about the state of the ships and the pollution that lurks within their rusting hulls that he can't bear to see them go. 'We have the technology to safely recycle the ghost fleet and provide much-needed jobs right here in the US,' he says.
Well might Virginia's shipyards smart. AbleUK was chosen by the US government for the disposal of the ships because, unlike most yards, it has the facilities to break up ships in dry conditions, where there is no chance of pollution leaking into the sea. As for the 'pollution slick' across the Atlantic, the ships will carry oil equivalent to less than 1 per cent of their weight — unlike the oil tankers that constantly cross the Atlantic, which are mostly oil. All other possible pollutants — including asbestos and the now banned PCBs formerly used in electrical plants — are in dry form.
Waste disposal is an unpleasant business, but a free market in waste is helping to develop expertise like that of AbleUK. To ban the export of toxic waste, as many environmental groups are demanding, will lead to the government's fridge fiasco on a global scale; where rubbish will be fly-tipped because there is no legal way to dispose of it.
Ross Clark
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