The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Department of Environment (DOE) Northern Ireland have launched a joint consultation regarding the implementation of recent EU regulations on ship recycling facilities.

The consultation invites responses from industry members regarding new domestic laws that would ensure compliance with EU Regulation 1257/2013 on ship recycling.

This regulation, which was agreed in June 2013, rules that all end-of-life ships must be recycled in EU-approved facilities, after the European Commission (EC) found that around 70 per cent of European ships were being sent for breaking on the beaches of Asian countries, where metal prices are high and labour costs are low. The EC ruled that this practice constituted a legal ‘grey area’ and caused ‘significant environmental pollution at a high cost to human health’.

The new law, which comes into effect in spring 2015, was therefore introduced in a bid to crack down on this practice, and effectively implements the rules of the 2009 Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships. It requires any EU facility wishing to recycle ships flying an EU member state flag and weighing more than 500 tonnes to first gain formal authorisation to do so.

As such, the UK is proposing legal changes regarding how UK ship recycling facilities are regulated to work on EU flagged ships.

Proposed UK legislation

According to Defra and DOE’s Ship Recycling Facilities Regulations 2015 consultation, only three of the 18 UK ship recycling facilities that are either currently operational (and hold the appropriate permits and approvals), or have previously been involved in ship recycling, have indicated a wish to become authorised to date.

As such, the two bodies are calling on relevant bodies to respond to the consultation to understand the relevant requirements should they wish to become permitted and ‘allow sufficient time to introduce the new measures to enable the notification of UK authorised facilities to the European Commission by 31 March 2015 as required by the EU Regulation’.

The UK and Northern Ireland regulations would introduce a domestic legal framework that designates the relevant national environment agency and the Health and Safety Executive as joint competent authorities that will administer the environmental and health and safety aspects of the EU Regulation with a single point of initial contact. As such, the Environment Agency is being proposed as the single point of initial contact for England, Wales and Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency as the point of contact in Ireland.

Further, any facility wishing to recycle ships from within the EU would be obliged to:

• produce a ship recycling facility plan describing precisely how the facility complies with the requirements of the EU Regulation (such as proving adequate insurance coverage for environmental remediation, having adequate hazardous waste management and storage, and detailing arrangements for ship arrivals and the recycling methodology);
• provide the competent authorities with the information to assess and verify ship recycling facility plans to ensure they meet the necessary requirements and can become permitted; and
• comply with health and safety regulations.

The proposals also suggest that any authorisations granted would be valid for a maximum period of five years, after which point they would need to be renewed.

Although the impact of the regulation is thought to be ‘low’, Defra and DOE have estimated that the cost to business for preparing a ship recycling plan would be between £126 and £380; the cost of initial authorisation (including assessments and site visits) would be between £5570 - £7570; and the renewal costs (for reappraisal of paperwork and potential site visits) would be between £2036 and £2736.

Stakeholders are being asked to outline whether the proposals would ensure that UK facilities have an effective means of becoming authorised that ‘doesn’t impose unnecessary burdens on business or conflict with existing permitting, licensing and authorisation processes’.

The consultation will run until 20 January 2015 and a summary of the responses will be published within 12 weeks of the closing date of the consultation.

Find out more about the Ship Recycling Facilities Regulations 2015 consultation or the problem of breaking ships in developing countries.