Most EU Ships Are Being Scrapped in South Asia Despite Sufficient Domestic Recycling Capacity, Confirms New Study

This is a shipping and recycling story, not a home upgrade one, but the underlying material matters: steel. A new study from the NGO Shipbreaking Platform and Transport & Environment finds that most ships owned or flagged by European Union countries end up dismantled on beaches in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, even though Europe has plenty of capacity to recycle them at home. Between 2019 and 2025, only 5% of the tonnage from 706 EU-linked ships was recycled at EU facilities. Nearly two-thirds went to South Asian beaching yards, where ships are taken apart directly on tidal mudflats with little containment, leading to contaminated water and soil and unsafe working conditions.

The report says this is also a missed opportunity: up to 95% of a ship's weight can become high-quality scrap steel, and recycled steel processed through electric arc furnaces is one of the cleanest ways to make new steel. By sending old ships overseas instead of recycling them domestically, the EU is giving up scrap that could feed its own steel industry as it tries to cut emissions from that sector.

For homeowners, this doesn't connect to any rebate or upgrade decision. It's worth knowing mainly as background on where the raw material for "green steel," used in appliances, structural components, and eventually lower-carbon building products, actually comes from, and how far the supply chain still is from matching climate goals on paper.