Sitakunda (Chittagong) ship-breaking yards

According to Wikipedia the industry began by accident: in 1960 a cyclone stranded the Greek ship M D Alpine at Sitakunda, where it was scrapped from 1965; commercial ship breaking started in 1974, when a local company bought the Pakistani ship Al Abbas as scrap. Between 2004 and 2008 Chittagong was the largest ship-breaking location in the world; in 2009 there were 40 yards.

Ships are cut up in the intertidal zone. In surface sediment off the yards the sum of 16 PAHs ranged from 1,899 to 156,800 ng/g dry weight, dominated by high-molecular-weight compounds of pyrolytic origin (Barua et al. 2024). In 60 sediment samples the means were 121.9 mg/kg chromium, 65.3 lead, 32.5 arsenic and 4.8 cadmium; in water too, all four metals exceeded recommended limits (Ali et al. 2022).

The contamination does not stop at the beach. In 2019–2020 Islam and colleagues measured sixteen elements in soil, rice and vegetables: at four exposed sites lead, cadmium, arsenic, vanadium, chromium, copper, zinc, tin and others were higher than at the control site, and in 30–50% of soils the indices showed moderate to high contamination by lead, zinc, cadmium, arsenic and selenium.