The world’s biggest ship-breaking town is under pressure to clean up

HOW DO YOU make a 10,000-tonne container ship disappear? At Alang, a small town in Gujarat, on the western coast of India, it happens regularly. At roadside stalls on its outskirts, shopkeepers sell furniture together with lifeboats; washing machines alongside emergency flares. Nearer the town, stalls give way to warehouses and enormous open-air yards; cranes stretch to the horizon. Ships that look like Lego sets being dismantled sit on a stretch of beach.

Alang is the world’s biggest ship-breaking town. Almost a third of all retired vessels—at least 200 each year—are sent to be broken up here, at over 100 different yards stretching along 10km of sand. The industry employs some 20,000 people, almost all men who migrate from the poorer states of India’s northern Hindi-speaking belt. Taxes paid by breakers generate huge sums for the state government. Yet it is a dangerous industry for its workers and a filthy one in environmental terms.