The ships are run aground under their own power during high tide, and then stripped of all the valuable smaller parts. They are then cut up into sections that are pulled up onto the beach with cables and winches. After a lot more cutting, moving, and sorting, the steel and parts are hauled off by truck. Almost everything is done by hand and with hand-held torches; The trucks and winches are often the only machines around.
Some of the steel hull plate and pipe is reused intact, but most of the steel goes to re-rolling mills or other steel re-processors in the area. Several miles of the Dhaka-Chittagong road, just inland from the yards, is lined with shops selling various other ship parts: pipe, valves, stainless steel galley (cooking) equipment, furniture, fire equipment, electric cables, generators, tools, insulation, lifeboats...
It is an amazingly efficient recycling system, with just about everything being reused. About 100,000 are employed directly or indirectly by downstream industries. Estimates at fraction of Bangladesh's steel supplied by ship breaking range from 30-80%. On the other side of the country, in Bogra, all the electric wire I've bought came from the ship yards.The first two pictures above are not my own; the second yard we visited agreed to let us in, but only without cameras. As the number of ship breaking yards grows, newspapers have been reporting the pollution from the yards, mangrove forest destroyed to make room for them, and the appalling worker conditions. Ironically, my best buy from the ship breaking stores was safety equipment -- eye, ear, and breathing protection. Those seemed to be piling up and serving as mice homes, while all the yard workers worked without any safety equipment, sometimes not even shoes.
