Alang-Sosiya ship-breaking yards

The first ship, MV Kota Tenjong, was beached at Alang on 13 February 1983. Ships arrive at high tide on the mud flats of the Gulf of Khambhat; when the water recedes, workers cut them up on the beach. According to Wikipedia, activity peaked at 415 ships a year in 2011–2012 and 196 were broken in 2020. Deshpande and colleagues (2012) speak of about 350 ships a year and about 60,000 workers.

Cutting painted plates releases metals into the air and, with the tide, into the sediment. A dispersion model estimated lead in yard air at 8–30 µg/Nm³, against an Indian standard of 0.5 µg/Nm³ (Deshpande et al. 2012). In seawater, petroleum hydrocarbons and PAHs were about three times higher in winter and twice as high in the other seasons than at a reference station at Mahuva, 60 km to the south (Reddy et al. 2005).

In 2006 India's Supreme Court temporarily barred the French aircraft carrier Clemenceau, bound for scrapping at Alang, after protests over the toxic materials on board; the ship went back to France (Wikipedia). During the May 2020 lockdown, with the yards idle, metals in coastal sediment and airborne dust fell sharply compared with 2018 and 2019 (Chanchpara et al. 2021).