China's Shipbreakers

Adam Minter has a series of posts on recycling in Asia.  This one features Chinese shipbreakers:

Shipbreaking: for the few Americans who know anything about it, the term invokes disturbing images of unprotected workers laboring in the shadow of hulking ship bodies on defiled beaches (in large part, thanks to William Langweische's landmark article on Indian shipbreaking for The Atlantic). And, indeed, that's an accurate depiction of how shipbreaking is done in most parts of the developing world. But the situation is changing in parts of Asia, in part because savvy Chinese steel and recycling entrepreneurs figured out that China's still relatively cheap labor allows them to offer environmentally-sound shipbreaking at prices that can't be matched in the developed world; and, in part, because Chinese workers simply won't tolerate Bangladesh-level working conditions and pay. These factors, and others, mean that Chinese ship breakers sometimes lose ship auctions to breakers in lower-cost countries (with their own, or nearby, steel industries to feed).