The toxic tide of ship breaking

> More regulation always favors big companies.

Is there actual research into this? I see this religiously repeated by a lot of people, but I somehow never see actual data to support it.

Outsourcing labor intensive work to lower income regions is almost universally a good thing but that doesn't mean that western corporations shouldn't be held liable for that outsourced labor. What needs to change is that corporations need to be required to perform due diligence that the work they contract out is meeting at least some established international labor standard (likely a lower standard than the country the western corp is operating out of has).

In the case of ship breaking, what needs to change is that any western corporation that owns and/or operates a ship during the last few years of its life needs to be held directly responsible for that ship until after it has been scrapped. They can contract the work out and all that but they should not be able to sell the ship off to a scrapper in the last few months of its life and wash their hands of their responsibility.

How long that last few years should be probably needs to be class dependent and you should probably be able to push off that "last few years" time window with a re-certification process (i.e. showing the ship still has at least x years of life on it).

If western countries actually held their corporations liable and stopped them from blindly pawning off work, they could drag up labor standards in other countries without depriving those countries of the outsourced work that their economies are heavily supplemented by.

You think some poor African nation cares about worker safety and environmental issues when half of their population can barely get enough to eat?

Hell, they barely have control over their own country let alone enforcing environmental or worker regulations.

> Next, the vessel goes into port to "gas-up" and "cool-down", as one still cannot load directly into the tank: The CO2 will freeze and damage the pumps and the cold shock could damage the tank's pump column.

> LNG is brought onto the vessel and taken along the spray line to the main vaporiser, which boils off the liquid into gas. This is then warmed up to roughly 20 °C (68 °F) in the gas heaters and then blown into the tanks to displace the "inert gas". This continues until all the CO2 is removed from the tanks. Initially, the IG (inert gas) is vented to atmosphere. Once the hydrocarbon content reaches 5% (lower flammability range of methane) the inert gas is redirected to shore via a pipeline and manifold connection by the HD (high duty) compressors. The shore terminal then burns this vapour to avoid the dangers of having large amounts of hydrocarbons present which may explode.

> Now the vessel is gassed up and warm. The tanks are still at ambient temperature and are full of methane.

> The next stage is cool-down. LNG is sprayed into the tanks via spray heads, which vaporises and starts to cool the tank. The excess gas is again blown ashore to be re-liquified or burned at a flare stack. Once the tanks reach about −140 °C (−220 °F) the tanks are ready to bulk load.

Wow, that's a whole lot of burning of hydrocarbons just to get the LNG into the tanker. How much does this overall add to the lifecycle carbon emissions of natural gas for electricity?

Lead is naturally found in sea water within 2-30 ppb.

To raise global lead concentration by 1 ppb you need to dump a few billion tons of lead.

It's often said that solution to pollution is dilution.