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27/09/2011
Legislative impediments for the treatment of vessels as waste
On the one hand, under the existing law, if an object is declared abandoned, it becomes automatically a waste, dangerous or not, but definitely a residue. We find that in auctions of ships declared abandoned, this does not apply, and the vessels are still considered as such, allowing access to them to both companies and individuals without licenses or permits as waste managers, not even as waste producers and causing a rise in prices that hinder the proper management of the ships.

In the Spanish law the figure of "ships out of use waste manager” does not exist, so there are no authorized agents and, worse still, the vast majority of the winners of the auctions do not have authorization as waste producers or facilities available and all they have is a permit from the harbour authorities to dismantle ships, and sometimes not even that, as the authorization is requested once won the auction (at the risk of not getting it).

Once awarded the ship and having clearly defined its destination as breaking (second reason, besides the declaration of abandonment, which defines a vessel as waste), it is prepared and reviewed for relocation and audited by the Harbour Master to establish its navigability and / or towability. Once accepted, the ship is towed (usually) to its destination. The actors here are the Harbour Authorities / Maritime Captain of origin and destination and the winner of the vessel, and at no time the environmental authorities are involves (the proof is that in Galicia, according to officials of the Department of Environment, has never handled a record for waste transfer involving a ship).

Given these irregularities, the intention in the project Recyship has been to purchase ships and transfer them correctly applying the existing law. Therefore, they were considered as waste and conveyed to the Portuguese authorities our intention to move the ships from Vigo to the project facilities in Aveiro, for which we were "condemned" to more than 3 months of waiting, the processing of endless documents, the posting of an incalculable bond due to missing of data and, finally, the loss of the ships.

At the same time, several ships roamed their final journey to different "facilities" for scrapping without any processing or control, under the indifferent gaze of the authorities, which have been questioned in this regard several times without response.





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