The European Commission is proposing to admit two Indian shipbreaking yards to its approved list, and both of them beach their ships. Shree Ram and YSI Recyclers, at Alang, run vessels onto the shore rather than break them up alongside a built quay, the method that has kept Alang off the European List since the list was created. Nothing in the Ship Recycling Regulation has changed. What has changed is how the Commission reads its own technical guidance, which lets a ship's own hull serve as the impermeable floor the rules require, provided oil booms are strung from hull to shore before anything is done that could threaten the environment and the rest of the bottom is moved onto a sealed surface as early as is feasible.
The longer fight
The fight over beaching is older than the list itself. When the European List was being assembled in 2016, France, Belgium and Germany were pressing for Alang yards to be let in while the Commission's assessors moved towards rejection; the NGO Shipbreaking Platform argued then that the yards had paved their secondary cutting zones but still ran ships up the beach, leaving workers exposed. By 2021 the Platform had hardened that into a legal position. End-of-life ships are waste, the EU may not export waste to non-OECD countries, and listing Alang would therefore be illegal whatever the Hong Kong Convention said. Industry's answer then is its answer now: capacity. Simon Bergulf, making the case for Maersk in 2021, put the number of OECD yards able to take panamax-size ships and above at 14, most of them in Turkey. He now speaks for the World Shipping Council, and he has welcomed this proposal, calling it "a practical and performance-based approach to sustainable ship recycling". Indian yards have been applying since 2016 without an approval; the Commission's register carried 35 of them at the end of April.
Already aboard
All 27 EU Member States and the Commission are asking IMO to set safety standards for the artificial intelligence built into ships' navigation and radio equipment, with the checking falling to flag administrations or classification societies. The EU Presidency compromise text, released to the Maritime Watch under EU transparency legislation, covers risk management, data quality, accuracy and cybersecurity, human oversight and traceability, and would be attached to the SOLAS footnotes rather than the convention itself. The case for moving now is defensive. AI systems are already entering operational fleets, and without IMO action the sector risks splitting into conflicting national and regional rules; the draft submission records that several such initiatives are already under way. The liability that follows is itself holding back take-up, the co-sponsors argue. The submission goes to IMO by 11 September and nothing would be in place before 2029.
There is much more on maritimewatch.eu, including this week's stories: Commission moves to merge FuelEU and ETS reporting into a single system and Russian LNG waiver carries cargo-by-cargo reporting duty. The archive runs to more than five thousand articles on EU maritime regulatory affairs. Free trials on request: editor@maritimewatch.eu.