Most cruise ships end their lives on the beaches of South Asia. When a cruise ship is too old or too expensive to maintain, it’s sold to a shipbreaking yard where workers dismantle it piece by piece for scrap metal and salvageable parts. In 2024, 214 of the 321 ships dismantled globally ended up in yards in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
The World’s Major Shipbreaking Yards
Three coastal stretches handle the bulk of the world’s ship recycling. The largest is Alang, a stretch of tidal beach in Gujarat, India, which processes roughly half the world’s scrapped vessels. Gadani, near Karachi in Pakistan, employs around 6,000 workers and dismantles up to 100 ships a year. Chittagong in Bangladesh rounds out the South Asian trio. Together, these yards dominate the industry because of low labor costs, high demand for recycled steel, and tidal conditions that allow massive ships to be run directly onto the beach.
Turkey’s Aliaga yard, on the Aegean coast, is the main alternative. It uses a pier-based approach rather than beaching, which is generally considered safer and more environmentally controlled. But the economics favor South Asia: scrap yards in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh pay $405 to $455 per light displacement ton of steel, while Turkish yards pay $265 to $295. That price gap means shipowners get significantly more money selling to South Asian breakers, which is why so many vessels, including retired cruise ships, end up there.
How a Cruise Ship Gets Dismantled
The process starts with one last voyage. A retired cruise ship is stripped of its branding and sailed under its own power (or towed) to the breaking yard. At beaching yards like Alang, the ship is driven onto the shore at high tide, where it runs aground and stops. The crew drops the anchor, shuts down the engines, and that’s the end of its sailing life. Workers then use heavy chains, cables, and machinery to winch the vessel as far up the beach as possible.
Before any cutting begins, fuel tanks are completely drained to prevent explosions. Then salvage crews board the ship to strip out anything resalable: furniture, electronics, plumbing fixtures, electrical wiring, machinery, even liquor and flags. In a cruise ship, this phase can be substantial since these vessels are essentially floating hotels packed with furnishings, kitchen equipment, and entertainment systems. Salvaged items are resold in local markets or repurposed.
The actual breaking starts from the top down. Workers armed with blowtorches and sledgehammers cut the superstructure into sections, which are then lowered to the ground and cut into smaller pieces. A large cruise ship can take months to fully dismantle. The recovered steel is melted down and recycled into new construction materials, rebar, and other products. Very little of the ship goes to waste in a pure material sense; the economic incentive is to extract value from every ton.
What Makes Cruise Ships Especially Hazardous to Scrap
Older cruise ships are laced with toxic materials that make dismantling dangerous. Paint on the hull and interior surfaces often contains lead, cadmium, and PCBs. Asbestos shows up in pipe insulation, bulkheads, wiring, boiler linings, and floor tiles. Electrical systems may contain PCBs and lead-shielded cables. The sheer size of a cruise ship, with thousands of cabins and dozens of decks, means these hazards are spread throughout a vast structure.
For workers in beaching yards, the health consequences are severe. A study of 94 workers exposed to asbestos at a South Asian breaking yard found that 35% were diagnosed with asbestosis, a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling asbestos fibers. Among workers at Alang, 16% showed abnormal chest X-rays and 39% had measurable loss of lung function. One projection estimated that 15% of Alang’s workforce engaged in asbestos-related work will develop mesothelioma, a deadly cancer linked to asbestos exposure. That translates to an estimated 4,513 cases.
Despite these numbers, official records in Gujarat show zero reported cases of occupational cancer from shipbreaking. Researchers attribute this to misdiagnosis, underreporting, and poor recordkeeping. There’s a local saying about working at Alang: “Alang se Palang,” which roughly translates to “from Alang to the deathbed.”
Why the COVID Pandemic Accelerated Scrapping
The cruise industry’s normal rhythm is to retire ships gradually as they age, typically after 25 to 30 years of service. But when the pandemic shut down global cruising in 2020, companies suddenly had entire fleets sitting idle and bleeding money. Ships that might have sailed another five years were sent to the breakers early. Well-known vessels that had carried millions of passengers were quietly sold to scrap yards in Turkey and South Asia, stripped of their logos, and broken apart.
This wave of early retirements drew unusual public attention to shipbreaking, partly because cruise passengers felt a personal connection to ships they’d vacationed on. But the process itself was no different from what had been happening for decades with cargo ships, tankers, and container vessels. Cruise ships just happened to have names people recognized.
New Rules Aim to Clean Up the Industry
The Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships entered into force on June 26, 2025. It’s the first binding international treaty specifically governing how ships are dismantled, and it places obligations on every party in the chain: shipowners, shipbuilders, flag states, and recycling yards.
Under the convention, every ship must carry an inventory of hazardous materials on board, updated throughout its life and verified through surveys. Before recycling begins, the breaking yard must produce a plan specific to that vessel, detailing how it will be safely taken apart. Yards themselves must be authorized and must maintain formal plans covering worker safety, training, emergency response, environmental protection, and record-keeping.
At Alang, some reforms were already underway before the convention took effect. Every worker is now required to complete a 12-day safety training program covering topics from metal cutting techniques to hazard identification, fire safety, and first aid. The Indian Supreme Court has mandated that medical records for workers exposed to asbestos be kept for 15 years after they leave the job, an acknowledgment that diseases like mesothelioma can take decades to appear.
Whether the convention meaningfully changes conditions on the ground remains an open question. The economic forces that drive ships to South Asian beaches are powerful, and enforcement depends on national governments with limited inspection resources. But for the first time, there’s a global legal framework that says shipbreaking yards can’t simply operate without oversight, and that the owners who profit from selling ships for scrap share responsibility for what happens next.