During the monsoons of 2025, one of us (Uddin), traveled to visit family members in Sitakunda, Bangladesh, home to the world’s largest beach-based shipbreaking yard. Over tea, Uddin’s cousins described how the shipbreaking industry, even from a distance, damages their farmlands.
They dismantle the ships when the tide goes down. When the tide comes back in, oil from broken ships, plastic fragments, pieces of wood, and broken furniture drift into our farmlands. Over time, the debris settles on the soil surface and forms a layer. The strength of the farmland declines, crop yields decrease. We need more fertilizer and chemicals and costs go up. And when we grow rice, beans, and other crops in this soil, they no longer taste the same.
When the soil becomes polluted and degraded, these agricultural lands lose productivity. They yield lower returns and farming becomes costly. Some of them are eventually sold or converted for industry, including for the expansion of shipbreaking activities.
Aging, toxic vessels from wealthy states in the Global North arrive on Sitakunda’s shores for dismantling after their profitable lives in global trade end. The steel recovered from these ships serves as the material foundation for public and private infrastructure development, including flyovers, bridges, factories, and high-rise buildings in cities like Dhaka and Chattogram.
Yet, the environmental and social costs of this process remain concentrated in the coastal communities of Sitakunda. Here, pollution, ecological degradation, bodily harm, and unsafe labor are treated as acceptable trade-offs for national economic growth and infrastructural expansion.
Even though the shipbreaking industry contributes to Bangladesh’s economic prosperity, it reproduces colonial logics through extraction and cost externalization. Sitakunda is an example of a so-called “sacrifice zone” where labor, ecologies, humans, and more-than-humans are rendered expendable.
What appears as urban and infrastructural development in these metropoles is, in fact, inseparable from the environmental destruction and social suffering occurring in the shipbreaking yards and beyond.
Extending Colonial economics
Following the end of British colonial rule in 1947 and independence from Pakistan in the Liberation War of 1971, Bangladesh became a postcolonial sovereign state with its own constitution, government, and political and administrative autonomy. From one perspective, Bangladesh’s transformation from one of the world’s “biggest poor countries” to a development success is undeniable. Bangladesh’s GDP has grown 5 to 8 percent nearly every year for the past thirty years. Beyond having a consolidated democracy, Bangladesh is expected to soon graduate from its Least Developed Country status.
Shipbreaking reproduces colonial patterns in which hazardous waste flows from the Global North to less-regulated, cheaper environments in the Global South.
Uddin’s cousins’ experiences contrast sharply with government portrayals of the $1.5 billion shipbreaking industry as a logical, even necessary, next step in Bangladesh’s development. That story positions waste ship processing as part of the country’s steady progression away from British colonial rule toward greater political and economic independence. Steel from shipbreaking underpins Bangladesh’s urban growth and infrastructure expansion.
However, a closer look reveals that this economic growth is achieved through extraction and cost externalization. The success story of shipbreaking intertwines with environmental degradation, unsafe labor conditions, and toxic exposure in coastal communities like Sitakunda. The benefits of shipbreaking flow to urban centers, industrial elites, and global shipping interests, while the environmental and social burdens remain localized around the yards.
Is this really a break from colonialism, or is it an extension of colonial economies?
Accidental Origins to Global Hub
Shipbreaking emerged in Bangladesh by accident. In the 1960s, the MV Alpine, a Greek ship, became stranded on shore during a cyclone. Local workers dismantled it manually. The demand for scrap steel during the post-independence period, along with weak environmental regulations, enabled global shipowners and local importers to dismantle end-of-life ships along Bangladesh’s coast over the following decades. As a result, the country became a global hub for processing waste ships.
Since the 1980s, a majority of scrap ships have been dismantled on the Bangladeshi coast. Bangladesh dismantled 130 ships in 2024 alone. During the 2000s, Bangladesh experienced rapid urbanization, driven by increased migration to cities for jobs, industrialization, and large-scale infrastructure projects. This fueled a growing demand for steel rods.
Today, ship scraps supply 80-90% of the country’s total steel rod demand, reducing the need for expensive imported steel. Once laborers dismantle the ships, the recovered steel plates go to one of the 130 re-rolling mills across the country. At the mills, they are cleaned, cut, and melted before being reshaped into rods used in private and public construction.
Indeed, the industry repurposes nearly every part of the dismantled ships. Scrap shops have emerged around the shipbreaking yards of Sitakunda. They purchase salvage materials from the yards and resell them. Shops as far away as Kadamtali and Postogola areas in Dhaka rely on salvaged machinery, tools, pipes, furniture, hardware, electronic goods, and other materials recovered from ships. This thriving secondary market helps contribute to the local economy. Items find second lives in homes, small businesses, fishing boats, workshops, and construction projects. Other industries in Dhaka and Chattogram refurbish the discarded mechanical and electrical equipment for use.
The Flow of Waste and Profit
In their prime, the world’s 105,000 cargo ships serve as an essential link in global trade, carrying goods from port to port. Why do these toxic ships eventually end up in Bangladesh? It’s a story of how global capitalism externalizes costs, and the enduring legacies of colonialism.
As once-productive lands lose value and become unsuitable for farming, they are turned into wastelands for the expansion of shipbreaking yards.
Today, ships do not simply arrive in Sitakunda by accident. International policy and regulatory frameworks help redirect hazardous waste from the Global North to the Global South. Strict environmental regulations, high wages, and expensive asbestos and toxic-waste removal in certified recycling facilities in wealthy nations require shipowners to pay very high costs for dismantling. As the remaining profit is usually very small (or even negative), most owners sell their vessels to intermediary cash buyers for a change of registration to other countries, often called a “flag of convenience.”
The cash buyer then sells the ships to yards in Bangladesh, where dismantling is far cheaper because of weak enforcement of environmental and labor safety regulations. Governmental trade-offs favoring economic growth permit dismantling toxic waste ships in the open, intertidal beach. This is widely known as the beaching method of dismantling. As Uddin’s cousins said, dismantling ships on largely open beaches causes oil residues, debris, and other toxic materials to mix with tidal waters and surrounding ecosystems.
Bangladesh has recently pursued “green” shipbreaking practices. However, these policies set comparatively minimal requirements, making it easier for shipbreaking yards in less-regulated countries to comply even while continuing hazardous practices such as beaching. As a result, most of the environmental obligations fall on dismantling countries rather than on the shipowners and wealthy states that sent the ships there.
Shipbreaking reproduces colonial patterns in which hazardous waste flows from the Global North to less-regulated, cheaper environments in the Global South. In this unequal system, Bangladesh becomes the sink for global waste simply because it is economically and politically easier for others to send ships there.
Toxic geographies
Unchecked development sacrifices land and people in Sitakunda to sustain cities like Dhaka and Chattogram. In this way, the shipbreaking industry reflects the scholar Julie Livingston’s notion of self-devouring growth, where development advances by consuming the very ecological, agricultural, and social conditions on which Sitakunda’s future depends.
The environmental and social harm generated by the industry extends far beyond the beached vessels. The shipbreaking site connects to broader coastal and lotic ecosystems on which marine, rural, and urban communities rely. The yards sit on the beaches of the Bay of Bengal, near the mouths of the Karnaphuli, Feni, and Sangu Rivers, whose waters flow into the sea just south of the shipbreaking belt.
The benefits of shipbreaking flow to urban centers, industrial elites, and global shipping interests, while the environmental and social burdens remain localized around the yards.
The yards do not contain the waste from dismantled ships. Instead, as waste dumps on the beach, oil residues, rust particles, and chemical runoff continuously enter nearby rivers and creeks. And as these contaminants mix with tidal waters, they harm aquatic life and other more-than-human elements of the local ecosystem. Fish and crab ingest the pollutants, cattle graze on contaminated grass, and crops absorb toxins from contaminated soil and water. These same toxins then enter the human food chain.
Together, these reveal a complex and interconnected web of slow violence and toxic geographies. As once-productive lands lose value and become unsuitable for farming, they are turned into wastelands for the expansion of shipbreaking yards.
The shipbreaking industry extends colonial logics by treating certain lands as expendable sinks for global waste and externalizing burdens onto the poorest local communities.
These environmental harms are especially felt by those who do the work of dismantling ships. Shipbreaking workers, many of them children and the very poor, face some of the most rampant labor abuse and dangerous and degrading working conditions in the world. As countries do not decontaminate vessels before redirecting them to Bangledesh, shipbreaking workers, many of whom operate without adequate safety gear, become exposed to toxic chemicals.
Exposure to pollutants and hazardous gases leads to both immediate and slow-onset health consequences, including respiratory illness, organ damage, cancers, neurological disorders, and long-term disability.
Furthermore, accidents, injuries, and even fatal deaths are widespread among workers. These working conditions and workers’ melancholy make shipbreaking profitable. Every risk absorbed by their bodies is a cost avoided by shipowners, cash buyers, and local yardowners.
Perpetuating colonial governance
Where is the government in all this? The Bangladeshi government’s role in the shipbreaking industry is far from straightforward, involving multiple agencies with overlapping responsibilities and weak enforcement. Despite enacting laws and regulations, limited enforcement capacity and pro-industry orientation permit rampant environmental and labor rights violations. Furthermore, the lack of coordination among the agencies involved, overlapping jurisdiction, weak on-site presence, and bureaucratic deflections of responsibility create regulatory gaps that enable both environmental pollution and labor exploitation.
The harms wrought by the shipbreaking industry are not unknown to the state. NGO reports, research, and international assessments have extensively documented them. Still, government institutions permit pollution and tolerate labor rights violations by prioritizing steel production, employment, and commercial gains over ecological and human costs. The government’s focus on maintaining pollution within “acceptable” thresholds and reference values continues to enable slow contamination and harm.
This regulatory tolerance echoes geographer Max Liboiron’s argument that pollution is colonialism. Declaring that pollution is acceptable until it exceeds a certain level still permits harm to people and ecologies while normalizing their continued exposure to risk. A colonial logic of governance and extraction shapes particular ecologies and bodies into peripheries to degrade and treat them as acceptable costs for supporting the metropoles.
Bangladeshi metropoles such as Dhaka and Chattogram benefit disproportionately, as steel produced from shipbreaking supports the construction of flyovers, high-rise apartment buildings, garment factories, and expanding urban infrastructure. Having spent time in Dhaka and Chattogram, we have seen their towering infrastructure, hailed as a symbol of Bangladesh’s development. Yet, beneath the steel that forms the foundation of these structures lies the sacrifice of Sitakunda’s people and environment.
Familiar patterns of exploitation
Shipbreaking illustrates how colonial dynamics still operate today, locally, nationally, and globally. At the global level, wealthy states and ship companies direct hazardous ships to Bangladesh, treating it as a sink. The Bangladesh government allows shipbreaking to operate in a dangerous, detrimental way for the sake of “national development.” At the local level, shipyard owners and importers maintain high profits by exploiting low-paid, replaceable workers and dumping dangerous waste on coastal lands.
These dynamics repeat patterns of exploitation long associated with colonial logics, where value accumulates through the degradation of marginalized people and places. Moreover, they perpetuate more-than-economic dispossession by generating uncontained pollution, seizing local agricultural, and public (khas) lands. In turn, this endangers ecologies, humans, and more-than-humans.
As the experiences of Uddin’s cousins show, the national economic development enabled by this industry is celebrated at the expense of Sitakunda’s ecologies, labor, agriculture, and overall well-being. They derive little or no benefit from the industry. Rather, shipbreaking undermines their livelihoods. They must spend time and labor clearing the oil residues and debris that settles on their land. As the natural fertility of their fields steadily degrades, they have to invest more money in fertilizers and other inputs to maintain production.
Uddin’s cousins’ farmland’s slow transformation illustrates that coloniality persists in Bangladesh, shaping who benefits, who suffers, and how global toxic waste trade promotes environmental injustice locally.
Featured Image: Chattogram shipbreaking yard. Photo by Naquib Hossain, 2008.
Md. Borhan Uddin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography, Environment and Urban Studies at Temple University. Previously, he worked as a development practitioner in Bangladesh, collaborating with national and international organizations on climate adaptation, livelihoods, and community-based development initiatives. His research focuses on critical climate adaptation and sustainability. LinkedIn. Contact.
Kimberley Thomas is a political ecologist and associate professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Urban Studies at Temple University where she serves as Graduate Chair and the Director of the Climate Justice Field School. Her research focuses on the political economy of climate adaptation and the vulnerabilizing effects of large-scale infrastructure in the Majority World. Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “Minimizing Animal-Human Conflict with Convivial Conservation” (October 2023). Website. Bluesky. LinkedIn. Contact.
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