These special and storied ships have served their respective countries since the Second World War. We shall look first at the British yards which are actively decommissioning and scrapping Royal Navy vessels.
The main one, Leavesley International, has successfully decommissioned and scrapped HMS Intrepid, a Falkland’s war veteran, for the admiralty. This company is complying with legislation brought out by the government departments of the Disposal Sales Agency and DEFRA, on the scrapping of ships strategy along with the Basel Convention report on cross-border shipping of waste. It hopes to get similar contracts from the government, and hopefully they will showing the rest of the ship scrapping industry that it can be done humanely and environmentally but still retain a profit margin. I noticed their advert on the EBay auction website for ships memorabilia, another environmentally friendly recycling innovation.
In the USA, a quantity of warships is lying tied up on the James River in Virginia as well as the other naval ships tied up elsewhere. A report was prepared (Rand Report) for Washington on the strategy of decommissioning these ex-US navy ships, which are known as the Ghost Ships.
One of the main points raised was, as usual, financial and stated that it would cost the US $1.8 billion to scrap this fleet, whereas to send them to India or China would cost just $170 million to scrap them.
Greenpeace commissioned a company to investigate current trends in this industry and to recommend financing a method of scrapping ships environmentally. They came up with a number of methods. One was to add an estimated scrapping fee at the construction phase, and another was to add a percentage into the ships insurance premium during its service life, to finance the best environmental methods of ship scrapping.
