The 11th Interim Meeting of the Asian Shipowners’ Forum (ASF) Ship Recycling Committee (SRC) was held in Jakarta on 10 March 2008. The meeting was attended by nineteen delegates from the ASF member associations of ASEAN, China, Chinese Taipei, Japan and Korea.

The Committee was hosted by the National Association of Chinese Shipowners and chaired by Mr. Arnold Wang, Chairman of the ASF Ship Recycling Committee.

The delegates expressed their appreciation to Indonesian National Shipowners’ Association (INSA) for arranging this meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia.

1. The SRC intensively discussed the recent developments on the IMO draft Convention on ship recycling and related Guidelines necessary under the Convention that are being developed by the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). It was confirmed that safe and environmentally sound ship recycling should be actively pursued as joint efforts by all stakeholders such as ship recycling facilities, shipowners, shipbuilders, ship equipment manufacturers and governments concerned.

A simple ship recycling procedures should be established in order to achieve smooth transfer of ships to recycling facilities.

2. The Committee noted that the trial of development of Inventories of ships was being carried out by the Japanese Government in accordance with the draft Guidelines for the Development of the Inventory of Hazardous Materials. The revised draft Inventory Guidelines developed based on the results of the trial will be submitted to MEPC58.

Although the SRC recognized the great importance of developing a common format for the Inventory of Hazardous Materials, the Committee, at the same time, confirmed that preparation of the Inventory would need full-scale involvement of governments, classification societies, shipbuilders and ship equipment manufacturers who have specialized knowledge of the construction of and equipment fitted to ships because of lack of adequate resources and expertise of shipowners to prepare the Inventory.

3. The SRC expressed its concern that the ISO 30000 series, which mainly deal with management, operation, audit and third party certification of recycling facility overlaps the activities of the IMO towards the development of the Convention and its Guidelines. The ISO standards regarding the recycling facility will cover the same field as the draft Convention and its accompanying Guidelines. Therefore, the Committee agreed that a possibility of double standards should be avoided, where the stakeholders such as recycling facilities and recycling states might be confused and be wondering which standards/guidances/guidelines should be referred to as the basic instruments.

4. The SRC noted the Work Programme for further development of the Convention, in which the final draft Convention would be tabled for MEPC58 in October 2008 and the Diplomatic Conference is scheduled for May 2009 to adopt the Convention.

Finally, it is confirmed that Asian shipowners’ as the major players in the world shipping industry, will continue to discuss the ways in which shipowners’ can promote safer and more environmentally sound ship recycling.

Attendance List: