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Instructors: Prof. Dr. Irene Peters; Malika Shambulova
Event type:
Project
Org-unit: Stadtplanung
Displayed in timetable as:
SP: P2
Crediting for:
Hours per week:
4
Location:
Hamburg
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 11
Registration group: P2-Projekt
Grading:
Beschreibung:
Big ships are made of steel, aluminium alloys, and often contain hazardous substances. What happens to these giants when they come to the end of their lives? Ideally, they are taken to a ship breaking yard (“Abwrackwerft” in German) where they are dismantled in high-tech fashion, with valuable materials salvaged for recycling and hazardous materials disposed of safely.
Reality is different. Of the tens of thousands of big ships that cross the oceans, the overwhelming part ends up in ship breaking yards with low standards for human and environmental safety, many of them on the Indian subcontinent. Steel is salvaged and other (often toxic) materials thrown into the sea, under highly unsafe working conditions. (Ships that are too difficult to disassemble are simply sunk, as Brazil did with an asbestos-contaminated decommissioned aircraft carrier in February 2023.)
As legislation on ship dismantling looks to be tightened, raw materials and energy inputs for producing these materials become scarce and expensive, and the sense of environmental responsibility is rising, state-of-the-art ship recycling is recognized as a business opportunity in those places that used to be home to ship building but lost this business to the Far East in the last decades. Hamburg’s ruling parties (the Social Democrats and the Greens) made the promotion of ship recycling in Hamburg part of their coalition treaty in 2020. In fall 2022, an industry consortium including a traditional Hamburg shipping company was considering to take over the bankrupt Hamburg Sietas Werft (ship yard) to start ship recycling there, but the deal did not go through.
In this project, we look at the potential for establishing state-of-the-art ship recycling in Hamburg or other German ports. What are the spatial requirements? What quantities of material are involved? What technical infrastructure and complementary industries does this need (e.g., steel works with the capacity to melt scrap steel), what type of specialized work force? What are the prospects of ship owners utilizing this service, rather than sending their old ships to the breaking yards in India?
This study project is open to exchange students. If there are interested exchange students that do not have a command of German, we will conduct (large parts of) the project in English. Otherwise, it will be conducted in German.
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