SHIPBREAKERS | Would you risk your life dismantling the world’s largest ships just to survive? | NFB

NFB · 5.8M views · 2017 · 1:12:52

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Ships, submarines & maritimeLabor, work & inequalityDocumentaries & storytellingdocumentary

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it for an up-close look at the shipbreaking industry.

What it is

An NFB documentary about the shipbreaking yards of Alang, India, where about 40,000 people dismantle huge ships by hand in dangerous conditions.

Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2022 to 2024.

What Hacker News said

Recommends Paddywack · 2022-07 · on “Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port”

I worked in Bangladesh for 3 years, and it is such a land of contrasts. The main electricity supply company at the time was running manual billings from a big room filled with manual general ledgers, one “T” account per household. It is a humbling, impoverished country with its main riches being its resilient, kind, resourceful people. Down the road/bay from Chittagong are the shipwrecking yards - a big time investment but worth watching is this… [this video] <edit> the film I am looking for is Iron Eaters, a very human view of the horrific shipyards. The above film is from India, but still worth looking at.

Recommends h0l0cube · 2024-05 · on “Shipbreaking”

Someone posted this hour long documentary on shipbreaking in the comments a while back. Both mortifying and fascinating to see this industry up close. [this video]

Recommends jitl · 2024-09 · on “Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money”

The cutting apart of ships at their end of life in salvage shipbreaker junkyards is fascinating, terrifying, and sad in equal parts. This (and similar) documentaries of the salvage beaches in India show a lot of interior cutting: [this video] It’s a stark juxtaposition from these shots of clean, carefully planned and engineered operations in high-tech ports. Shipbreaking is often done freehand, based on experience and intuition, without much in the way of reference documents or safety gear.

Cites RichardCA · 2024-04 · on “Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores”

> something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals' Better than shipbreaking. [this video]