EU Recycling Yards Used 5% of Their Capacity While Owners Beached 345 Ships
Only 153 of 706 EU-flagged or EU-owned ships scrapped since 2019 were dismantled inside the bloc
The European Union has built out ship dismantling capacity that goes largely unused while European tonnage continues to be scrapped in South Asia, on the evidence of new research covering the period from 2019 to 2025.
The Shipbreaking Platform, working with Transport & Environment, found that roughly 30 yards inside the bloc hold a combined capacity of about 1.3m light displacement tonnes. Over the seven-year period those facilities used merely five percent of that capacity, because most EU-owned or EU-flagged vessels were dismantled in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh instead.
The volumes behind that ratio are substantial. Across the period, 706 EU-flagged or EU-owned ships representing approximately 6.7m ldt were dismantled worldwide. Only 153 of them, 22 percent by ship count, were recycled at EU facilities, and those accounted for just five percent of the total tonnage. The gap between the two percentages is the point: the ships that stayed in Europe were the small ones.
By contrast, 345 EU-flagged or EU-owned ships, 49 percent of the total and 66 percent of the tonnage, were beached in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Most of the remainder were dismantled in Turkey. A further 102 vessels changed flag out of an EU registry immediately before demolition, a manoeuvre that removes the ship from the scope of the stricter European rules at the last possible moment.
The research lands as the bloc proposes adding Indian recyclers to its approved facilities list, a step the organisations behind the study oppose. Philippine Bernard, policy officer at the Shipbreaking Platform, said: "This is not just an environmental issue. It is a profound failure of EU industrial strategy, prioritizing strategic resilience and material autonomy on paper, while in reality letting valuable steel be lost to third markets."
The Platform argues that the pattern amounts to a double standard, since the Ship Recycling Regulation requires EU-flagged vessels to use approved facilities, and that permitting demolition at substandard yards points to either a failure or an unwillingness to enforce the rules. Industry has taken the opposite position for years, contending that approved yards lack adequate capacity, which is the argument used to justify reflagging and to press for South Asian beaching yards to be added to the European list.
The study builds on similar work by both organisations in 2018, which reached the same conclusion that the bloc already had enough capacity for all EU-flagged vessels. What has changed since is the scale of the coming wave: approximately 12,000 EU-owned ships reach the end of their working lives within the next decade, and the ship recycling decisions taken on those hulls will determine where several million tonnes of steel end up.
