Ironeaters, iron people, is a documentary written and directed by Shaheen Dill-Riaz in 2007. In the Basque Country, so linked to the sea, this film which tells life in the slaughterhouses of the large paquebotes built in shipyards in Europe and the rich world is not well known.

Bangladesh. The people are unable to feed their children. Rainfall, droughts, soil erosion... The farmers in northern Bangladesh can no longer and have to go south to look for work. The employers know how bad they are, that they will tolerate everything. This is how you'll see thousands of small, gigantic, neglected men, without any equipment. No shoes between pointy irons. Transporting orthots and husks of hands.

There's no helmet here, no gloves, no glasses, no metal cut if it's a torch. If it is amazing to see the passersby landing the boat pulling the tide rope, the documentary shows again and again a series of misunderstandings: the transatlantic, the ferry or the giant cargo falling all the way to the arenal, the worker superior to the joke like the mason, “those who pull down the cable have a problem, not us, ja, ja, ja”....

The three-minute trailer of the documentary Eisenfresser, German production, is available in the space of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform coordinator. You'll see one of the contractors denying the workers part of the day and explaining to the camera: “The problem is, if I pay you now, you will come home, leaving me without employees. Do you understand? That’s why I have to keep my salary.”

There's no greater mystery in the system. The thousands have to swallow anything to get something, a few can do whatever they like. The owners also sell them the beds and food they need during their work on the shore. European 19th century in Asia XXI.ean.

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform is the coordinator of NGOs working on ship crashing. A plural meeting point, with trade unions, human rights defenders and environmentalists, among others. Among them, Zero Waste Europe, Zero Zabor movement.

Created as a European platform, it has spread to the whole world. The platform has brought together associations from countries that have such scrap yards, countries where shipping companies and consumers are involved in shipping.

Off the beach! Out of the beach! During these years, the platform carries out its campaign. “The transfer of boats to the beaches is the source of all the major problems: severe pollution, dangerous working conditions, crushing workers and the violation of international legislation for the waste industries.”

Have you said heavy metal?

The European Union has calculated that pasquins sent from Europe each year to naval cemeteries in South Asia contain more than 40,000 tonnes of toxic substances, including 3,000 tonnes of asbestos or asbestos. One in five workers involved in the recycling process of this waste is less than 15 years old, if you will be allowed to call them that.

No one knows a certain number of deaths at work, hundreds of insurance and more than a thousand more safe. Just counting the deaths in accidents. Because the survival of workers is 40 years. Survivors of the following years will have to suffer from cancer and other poisonous diseases with fragile hands.

In the Baforetzarros, asbestos is everywhere, now eliminated in Europe by specialists dressed in Martian, but the slaves on the shore of the Bangladeshi sea also use it for chabolas.

In these large ships there is lead, mercury, cadmium, zinc, heavy metals of all kinds. Acid has nothing to say anymore. And the oil, oil wells cooled by giant motors. And the products that carry by themselves the paints, the insulation, the embellishers, the plastics to cover the cables and a thousand other items, plus the products generated by the heating of them: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PCB, TVT...

Metal monsters that have been as complex as peoples gather all the poisons of the world. Their recyclers treat ants as ants, charging less than two euros a day. Sometimes in exchange for food, just. There is no contract, no insurance, no trade unions.

In addition to men, the surrounding people also suffer poisons from polluting factories. There is no control over discharges. How, then, if they do not have a defined field? You choose a beach, land the boat with the tide and act.

With oils, powders and other chemicals, the whole region has been contaminated. To work, you have to cut off the rich mangroves of the shores. The fishermen are going to get stuck with the pollution. The land of the peasants in the area is deteriorating.

One of the keys is the lack of control of the maritime industry in the export chain of polluting waste from the north to the poor south. They change the boat easily from name, owner and flag. If a monster arrives on the shore of India with the ikurrina of St. Kitts, to whom do you call to account?

They're called flags of convenience, flags that can be used as conventions. NGO coordinator Shipbreaking Platform introduces control of those units Off the beach! Within the campaign. They recognize that they have a hard time. So far, the Basel agreement required the exporter to ensure that the conditions of the ship, once it reached the scrap yard, had already been eliminated its main contamination. But the agreement reached in 2009 in Hong Kong will leave the hands even freer for shipping companies, as theoretical control is for the country that bears the last flag, not the real one.

The platform publishes, together with the annual reports, the lists of the hundreds of ships sent to Asia. It closely monitors the most prominent, denouncing changes in owners, names and flags.

The Ivanovic people have also won a brilliant victory over the whole of Dusko Ivanovic. The boat Clemenceau, sent to India by France in 2005, was forced by the media, which had caused so much pride, to the GOI, with 700 tonnes of asbestos it was carrying on its eve. After being returned to Europe by the French authorities, Clemenceau was shot down in 2009 at the Able shipyard in England.