Boats, ships, and the 1st world vs the third

So I'm listening to this book The Outlaw Sea, and while I cannot highly reccomend it, it enlightened me on a question I've been pondering for awhile: Where do all the old ships go? They used to go to places like Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana to get cut up. With rising wages, better jobs, and increased environmental regulation ship breaking has moved onto cheaper shores. First South Korea and Taiwan but now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. The book talks about Alang, India. A village that fronts on the Arabian Sea that experiences extreme tides. At the highest of the high tides (every two weeks) they plow ships onto the sand at full power and wait for the waters to recede. Then they cut them up.

The images of this are stunning. Imagine miles of beach/mudflats with the world's ships lined up in various stages of dissection. It's beautiful if not for the horrendous pollution, danger, and death that this industry causes. There is little to no thought for worker safety or protecting the environment. Greenpeace has become very vocal about this and has begun patrolling, infiltrating and documenting the worst of it, but sadly I think this strikes at the wrong target.

The worker safety is something that should be addressed, but the pollution is more our fault then India's in my mind. There are laws on the books that mandate before selling for scrap that all the toxic materials are to be removed and disposed of properly. Of course this is almost never done and there's no enforcement. So the Indians are left to clean up, or not clean up the mess. With margins so thin on ship-breaking if they impose to many expensive regulations, practices the whole industry will simply move somewhere else, as it has twice before because there is no real global oversight.

I'm stumped on the right solution. Something that is less patronizing than greenpeace's approach, but something that does solve the problem and not merely let a bad situation continue because peoples live depend on it...

At any rate the photos are stunning. Do an image search on Alang.