Green activists, academicians and chemical experts at a roundtable on Wednesday called for bringing an end to the ship breaking operation in the country as the toxic chemicals in the ships damaged forest, seawater, fishes, and trees along with workers’ lives.
The speakers also urged the government to make effective the drives against chemical warehouses in the city for moving them out of all residential areas to ensure a safe city life.
Save Environment Movement organised the roundtable on ‘Ship breaking operation, chemical warehouses in residential areas: How many undue death’ at the National Press Club in Dhaka with Bangladesh Chemical Society president M Muhibur Rahman in the chair.
SEM general secretary Kamal Pasha Chowdhury, in the keynote address on ship breaking operation, argued that activities that are doing more harm than good to the society and environment should not be dubbed as ‘industry’.
The ship breaking ‘operation’, he said, expanded in the country after 1998 and claimed, in the mean time, at least 115 lives in 68 fatal accidents. The toll would rise, he said, if the deaths from diseases caused by toxic fumes and materials workers were exposed to all the times would be included.
Due to ship breaking yard’s pollution, different species of seawater and nearby forests had become extinct and several others rare in the country, he said adding that more species would join the list if the activity goes on.
There is no logic to continue an operation like the ship breaking that causes harm to lives of human and other species, said M Muhibur Rahman.
The speakers urged the government to ensure, until the breaking stops, that the ships were cleaned and uncontaminated before bringing in the country and the breaking activities were done in dry dockyards following all safety rules and regulations for the workers and the environment.
SEM assistant secretary Mahbubul Alam read out the keynote paper on chemical warehouses in residential areas stressing the need for shifting the store for the sake of people’s lives.
Mahbubul said the chemical traders should not make some 12 lakh residents in Old Town hostage before the risk of life only for their business purpose. ‘People is not for the business, rather business is for the people.’
He also put forward six-point demand which included shifting all chemical shops, stores and factories from the residential areas, immediate implementation of fire safety measures in such establishments and formulating a time-befitting regulations for trading, storing and using chemicals.
A documentary on ship breaking activities, The Last Rites, directed by Yasmine Kabir, was also shown at the programme.
Among others, Dhaka University chemistry professor Abu Jafar Mahmud, ecologist Hossain Shahriar, also spoke at the programme moderated by SEM chairperson Abu Naser Khan.
