Strategic guidance based on the concept of cleaner production to improve the ship recycling industry

The implementation of international ship recycling regulations and international standards of health, safety and environment on a ship recycling yard improves environmental protection, occupational health and safety of the workers. However, it results in increased costs of the ship recycling process, which is detrimental for offering a high price to ship owners for buying end-of-life ships. In order to improve their competitiveness in the market, such “green” recycling yards, as they are generally called, must either increase the revenue or reduce the costs of the ship recycling process. Apart from this, being regulatory compliant, such yards must also plan the recycling process systematically. This paper aims to identify strategies that can help recycling yards achieve these objectives. The effective strategies are identified using the concept of cleaner production. It is chosen because it is a preventive environmental strategy that provides generic options to improve the financial and environmental performance of the production firms. The applied research method first establishes that the ship recycling process can be considered as a production process and then reviews each of the generic cleaner production options with respect to ship recycling. As a result, three strategies are identified, which are material flow analysis, design-for-recycling and waste-to-energy technology