A Locational Decision Making Framework for Shipbreaking under Multiple Criteria

Introduction

Shipbreaking is a multi-billion dollar industry, flourishing largely in the developing Asian countries; particularly in India, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan (UNCTAD, 2012). The industry gained the attention of environmental activists, regulators, researchers and media during the recent years; environmental impact due to shipbreaking and dangerous working conditions for laborers in the shipbreaking yards of the third world, being the visible symptoms that raised the alarm, placing the industry in focus. With the subsequent microscopic scrutiny that followed, there have been several studies on shipbreaking and ship recycling activities around the world, with special attention on yards in the Indian Subcontinent, i.e. Alang-Sosiya Ship Recycling Yard (Gujarat, India) and Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard (Bangladesh), which accounted for the bulk of global shipbreaking in the last two decades. Due to the largely unexplored nature of the shipbreaking industry, most of the pilot research studies conducted in recent years, are predominantly qualitative in nature, concentrating on process mapping (Asolekar, 2006, 2012; Demaria, 2010; Hiremath et al., 2015; Hossain & Islam, 2006; Hossain et al., 2010; Pelsy, 2008; Sivaprasad, 2010; Thomas 2007; Upadhyay 2002); with few studies on social & environmental impact assessment (Islam & Hossain, 1986; Pathak, 1997; Reddy et al., 2003, 2004a, 2005a 2005b; Sonak et al., 2008), and developing methodological frameworks for shipbreaking industry (Carvalho et al., 2009; Huang, 2010). A taxonomic listing of relevant research papers on shipbreaking is represented in Table 1.