Who We Are
The HKC Shipbreaking Platform is a coalition of environmental, human, and labor rights organizations committed for over a decade to defending shipbreaking workers’ rights to safe jobs, advocating the adoption of best available technologies, and promoting globally consistent environmental standards. We challenge a powerful shipping industry that historically evades accountability and perpetuates unsafe, polluting shipbreaking practices.
Raising Awareness and Driving Change
With broad geographic and thematic support, we expose human rights abuses and pollution caused by shipbreaking, aiming to influence both policy makers and market mechanisms. We advocate diverting shipbreaking traffic from hazardous beaching sites toward facilities that uphold principles of human rights, corporate accountability, environmental justice, the polluter pays principle, and producer responsibility.
Our Vision
Ships are recycled in facilities that ensure clean, safe, and just working conditions, providing decent employment free from toxic exposures. End-of-life vessels will no longer harm workers, nearby communities, or the environment.
Our Mission
We act as catalysts for change by denouncing dangerous practices such as beaching and dumping vessels on developing country shores. We pursue sustainable global solutions rooted in respect for human and labor rights, environmental justice, and corporate responsibility and clean production practices.
Our Successes
Collaborating with progressive industry actors and policymakers while exposing illicit practices, the Platform’s advocacy is gaining momentum. Over 100 NGOs worldwide, the EU, UN Special Rapporteurs, and leading shipping banks support our calls to end beaching and promote safe, clean ship recycling.
We helped secure a new EU law aimed at steering more ships to responsible recyclers, banning beaching, improving waste management, and promoting decent work. Our annual global ship dismantling reports are widely used by banks and investors for responsible portfolio screening. In 2018, Scandinavian pension funds divested from companies engaged in beaching, marking a milestone in financial accountability.
We have instigated investigations into the murky shipbreaking industry, with a shipowner criminally convicted for selling ships for hazardous breaking for the first time in 2018. In South Asia, our members continue to bring cases before courts, assist workers and their families in securing compensation and decent working conditions, earning prestigious awards such as the Goldman Prize and Magsaysay Award for these efforts.
Ongoing Commitment
To make safe and clean ship recycling the global norm, not the exception, we actively engage policymakers, financial leaders, corporate stakeholders, and courts. We collaborate with industry frontrunners and governments to reform substandard practices that annually cause fatalities, diseases, and environmental damage.
Join Us in Advancing Safe, Sustainable Ship Recycling
Support the HKC Shipbreaking Platform’s mission to protect workers, communities, and environment by promoting responsible ship recycling worldwide. Stand with us to hold industry and governments accountable and foster lasting change.