The European Commission and the Council should have acted much quicker to stop the damage to human health and the environment caused by ship dismantling, primarily on unprotected beaches in Southern Asia, MEPs said this week. In adopting most of the amendments to the own initiative non-legislative report of Dutch MEP Hans Blokland (Independence and Democracy group), the European Parliament Environment Committee backed most of the stringent demands of Green MEPs UK's Caroline Lucas and Belgium's Bart Staes (see EE & PL: 28 March 2008,p.9-10). Notably the Committee lamented the fact that the Commission refrained from any action on ship dismantling in 2002 as the study considered it difficult to make ship recycling economically viable: "This primacy of short term profits over human lives and environmental pollution is unacceptable and its current assessment is at least ten years overdue."
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