They arrive like wounded whales, heavy with rust and secrets—oil-streaked, chemical-laced carcasses of ships that once moved the wealth of the world. Now they beach themselves at Sitakunda’s graveyard coast, where bare-chested workers with no boots or masks rip them open like surgeons without anaesthesia. It is not just metal that spills into the earth here. It is memory, poison, and a kind of national complicity that corrodes quietly, like salt on steel. Ship breaking activities in Bangladesh are concentrated around Sitakunda (from Bhatiary to Kumira), located just north of Chittagong city along the Bay of Bengal. It is critically significant to the macro and micro economy of impoverished Bangladesh.

Until the 1960s, shipbreaking was seen as a highly mechanical process, predominantly located in industrialized nations, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy. Since the early 1980s, ship owners have dispatched their boats to the scrap yards of India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Vietnam, where remuneration, health, and safety requirements are poor, and workers are in dire need of employment. But now Bangladesh’s ship-breaking industry, one of the largest in the world, has for decades been both a source of economic pride and environmental devastation. The industry contributes significantly to domestic steel production—almost 60% of our raw steel comes from dismantled vessels. It employs thousands, mostly from impoverished regions, who take apart decommissioned ships under the open sky. But beneath this surface of economic gain lies a coastline smeared with asbestos, heavy metals, oil sludge, and toxic dust. The waters of Sitakunda are not just polluted—they are dying, strangled by decades of chemical dumping and reckless neglect.

They arrive on Sitakunda’s shores battered and worn—once huge cargo ships, now slowly taken apart by workers who earn barely enough to get by. There are no strict rules here: just a heavy winch, some blowtorches, and a bulldozer. After that, it’s all raw muscle and determination. Men and women, their faces streaked with oil and sweat, climb into tight, dark holds full of asbestos and oily residue. Day in and day out, they cut steel by hand with little protection and lower pay than almost anywhere else in the world. Yet their work feeds our industries and builds our cities. Behind every ton of recycled steel is a human story of hardship, resilience, and hope—but also of real risk and too little support.

Every year, more than 200 ships run aground on the beaches of Chattogram. Many of them are known environmental hazards even before they leave their ports—vessels flagged for unsafe materials, flammable residues, and undocumented waste. Bangladesh, lacking stringent inspection protocols and pressured by local industry owners, has become a dumping ground for the world’s maritime waste. These vessels, some of them nuclear-linked or oil-contaminated, are dismantled by hand. There are no decontamination facilities, no contained cutting systems—only fires, sweat, and silence.

Subsequent administrations have committed to environmental change; nevertheless, enforcement remains alarmingly inadequate. Legislation exists, including Ship Breaking and Recycling Rules, 2011 (these rules were an early attempt to regulate the industry before the 2018 Act), the Bangladesh Ship Recycling Act, 2018 (this is the primary legislation governing ship breaking and recycling in Bangladesh) and High Court directives intended to regulate environmental and labour norms; nevertheless, enforcement is inadequate and frequently evaded. Dominant shipyard proprietors persist in profiting from regulatory stagnation. Environmental watchdogs assert that the government has not executed even fundamental measures, such as the pre-cleaning of dangerous items or the proper disposal of garbage. The Department of Environment is ineffective, either inadequately funded or reluctant to confront the industry’s most powerful benefactors.

The current time is even more troubling by the silence of the interim government. In the absence of direct electoral pressure, one could presume now is the opportune moment to move decisively and implement long-overdue ecological accountability. Nevertheless, the interim administration has sustained an unsettling silence. The silence from the office of the environmental advisor is particularly surprising, given that she is a known environmentalist herself. Her public credentials are impeccable: decades of campaigning, several honours, and global recognition. At this critical moment, her office has not released any substantial statement, nor has it provided regulatory opposition to the industry’s continued harm to our shoreline.

This paradox calls for a reckoning. Why does a powerful environmentalist remain mute while rivers darken and mangroves vanish? Why is this time of administrative neutrality not grabbed to start long-overdue change? Some claim the economy—any change in ship-breaking would result local unemployment, building cost increases, and steel supply losses. Others suggest that political calculation is at play: not rocking the boat when temporary governance already rests on shaky legitimacy. But these excuses wear thin when one considers the irreversible costs. Soil cannot be unpoisoned. Marine life, once extinct, cannot be recalled.

The human toll is equally grim. Workers in shipyards often suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, skin infections, lead poisoning, and loss of limbs from explosions and structural collapses. Many are teenagers. Protective equipment is rare; medical care is rarer still. Labour courts are virtually inaccessible to these men, whose contracts are informal and whose lives are deemed as expendable as the steel they cut. What kind of state permits this quiet war against its citizens—one arc weld, one lungful of smoke at a time?

There is also the international dimension. The Basel Convention and the Hong Kong Convention on Ship Recycling outline clear responsibilities for the safe dismantling of vessels. Bangladesh has signed on, even taking international loans to “green” its shipyards. But compliance is another story. Many of the supposed “green yards” are green in name only—cosmetic changes that do little to alter the toxic status quo. Until international treaties are woven into enforceable domestic law, they remain paper shields against iron giants.

And yet, there are solutions. Countries like Turkey and China have invested in dry-dock dismantling, creating environmentally secure facilities that contain and treat hazardous waste. This method, utilizing dry docks rather than conventional beaching techniques, is seen as a more ecologically responsible means of ship dismantling, since it allows superior containment of hazardous waste and enhanced oversight of the entire procedure. Why has Bangladesh not followed suit? The answer lies in the lack of political will. A dry-dock system would be expensive, it would require transparency, and it would certainly threaten the informal profiteering that runs deep in Sitakunda’s economy. However, when considering the long-term costs—environmental collapse, public health disasters, and international trade sanctions—it is not a question of whether we can afford to act, but rather whether we can afford not to.

The question, then, is not whether the ship-breaking industry will continue to exist—it will likely do so. The question is whether it can exist without poisoning everything it touches: the water, the soil, the lungs, and the future. Reform is not impossible. But it will require us to do what we rarely do in Bangladesh—hold the powerful accountable and value long-term survival over short-term convenience.

Because every ship that dies on our shores leaves behind more than scrap, it leaves a trace of how we govern, what we protect, and whom we choose to sacrifice. The sea remembers. The soil remembers. The question is, will we?