Material Flow Analysis Technique for Material Assesment of Ship Recycling Industry

Author: Khandakar Akhter Hossain
DOI: doi.org/10.70279/bmj-v3-i1-1010
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Ship recycling is a viable engineering process of recovery shipbuilding materials by dismantling end-of-life (EOL) ships in a profitable and safe way. There are few dozens of ship-recycling yards existing along coastal belt at Chottogram of Bangladesh. The local ship recycling industry provides the country's main source of steel, recondition equipment and machinery. The industry creates the opportunity of employment, generates revenues for government and contributes to the national shipbuilding industry. This industry promotes economic development for this country. At the same time, the negative image such as environmental pollution, health hazard and few accidents brings major challenges that should be overcome for the constancy of this industry in the long run. There are limited studies that have been found and most were based on preliminary and secondary baseline data analysis. The economic study of the local ship recycling industry particularly the recovery of reusable material and waste material generated from the ship recycling industry was derived on the basis of benchmarks from other countries. As a result, the policy-making decision based on those studies is not technically sound. From this perspective, the paper will discuss the viable economic assessment technique for ship recycling process by taking help both from existing literature and from other similar industry; justify the sustainability of material flow analysis (MFA) method for calculating the reusable material for local yards; apply the method on actual ground by feeding realistic situation and data. In this research work, more than one dozen ship yards have been selected to accumulate the data for a quite substantial period of time for various types of ships generally handled by the local ship breaking yard in Bangladesh. The study could be helpful for all stake holder and policy makers who are related with local ship breaking yards of Bangladesh