Only 5% of EU ship tonnage was recycled in Europe over seven years, new capacity report finds

European shipowners sent 706 vessels for dismantling between 2019 and 2025, and only 153 of them went to a European yard. That is 22 per cent of the ships but just 5 per cent of the tonnage, because the largest vessels go abroad. The finding comes from “Capacity to recycle ships in the EU”, a report published on 31 August 2026 by the NGO Shipbreaking Platform and Transport and Environment, both based in Brussels. Its argument is that the shortfall in EU ship recycling is a commercial choice rather than a physical constraint.

Over the same period 345 ships, 49 per cent of the total, were beached in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Those vessels carried 66 per cent of the tonnage. Most of the rest went to Türkiye. The report’s scope covers ships flagged in or owned from EU member states, EEA states and Switzerland, the last included because MSC is domiciled there, and it counts as European yards only those in EU member states and Norway.

What the EU ship recycling numbers show

The report’s central comparison is a single year. In 2020, the busiest year for global demolition in the period, European facilities held an authorised recycling capacity of 2,104,000 light displacement tonnes while EU-owned ships sent for dismantling that year came to 1,369,554 LDT, about 65 per cent of that capacity. In the same year 71 per cent of EU-owned tonnage went to the beaches of South Asia.

The report also matched every beached vessel against the length and width limits of each listed European yard. It concludes that each one “could have been accommodated by at least 6 to 8 yards, depending on the EU list edition”. The example it gives is the Gema, a 333-metre crude oil tanker owned by the Greek company Angelicoussis Group and the largest ship broken up in 2020. Six compliant European facilities could have taken it. It was beached in Bangladesh after switching from the Greek flag to that of Comoros.

Source: NGO Shipbreaking Platform and Transport and Environment, “Capacity to recycle ships in the EU”, 31 August 2026.

Flag-switching is the mechanism that makes this legal. The EU Ship Recycling Regulation binds ships flying a member state flag, so an owner who reflags shortly before the last voyage steps outside it. The European Commission has made the same point in its own evaluation, which describes the regulation’s effectiveness as undermined by “the practice of shipowners changing the ship’s flag from a Member State’s flag to a non-EU flag shortly before being recycled”.

The rules and the list

Regulation (EU) No 1257/2013 was adopted on 20 November 2013 and became fully applicable on 31 December 2018. Since then, EU-flagged ships may only be recycled at a facility on the European List. Part A of that list covers EU and EEA facilities authorised by national regulators. Part B covers third-country facilities, which apply directly to the Commission and are checked by an independent verifier on site. Listings run for five years and each entry states the recycling method, the maximum ship size and an authorised annual output.

Compiled from Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/448 and its annex. The Commission describes the list as 30 facilities in Europe, 10 in Türkiye and 1 in the United States.

No facility in India, Bangladesh or Pakistan is on the current list, and no listed facility uses the beaching method. That may change. On 22 July 2026 the Commission published a draft implementing decision for a 16th edition that would add two Indian yards at Alang in Gujarat, YSI Recyclers LLP and Shree Ram Vessel Scrap. Both are listed in the draft annex under the method “Beaching”. The feedback window closed on 30 August 2026 with 61 submissions and the decision has not been adopted. The draft would also remove four yards, including two in Türkiye, one after an inspection found an absence of an oil boom around the vessel and leakage from a waste liquid tank.

The alternative international rulebook came into force last year. The Hong Kong International Convention, adopted in 2009, entered into force on 26 June 2025 and had 33 contracting states as of 26 August 2026. The Commission’s own 2025 evaluation sets out the differences: the EU regulation requires facilities to operate from built structures and to handle hazardous materials only on impermeable floors with effective drainage, requirements the convention does not contain. The Commission has also written that the convention, unlike the Basel Convention, contains no geographical limitation on moving an end-of-life vessel from an OECD to a non-OECD country.

The shipowners’ answer

European shipowners argue the opposite case on capacity. In a July 2025 position paper, the European Community Shipowners’ Associations wrote that although the number of listed facilities is growing, their capacity “remains insufficient to meet the demands of the shipping industry, and to meet the needs of ocean-going ships”, and urged the Commission to add compliant yards in non-OECD countries. The paper notes that 32 Indian facilities have applied to the European List since 2016 without being accepted. On 23 July 2026, the day after the draft appeared, ECSA welcomed the two Indian yards, with secretary general Sotiris Raptis calling it “a long-awaited and very welcome step”. Neither ECSA nor the Commission had responded to the capacity report at the time of writing.

The report itself concedes part of the point. It states that current European capacity averaging 1.96 million LDT a year “could prove sufficient to recycle EU-flagged ships but falls short” of what the coming wave of EU-owned vessels will demand. Its forecasting chapter, built with Sandbag and the University of Tuscia from a sample of 11,902 EU-owned vessels over ten years old, projects sustained demolition of 600 to 700 ships a year at peak between 2033 and 2037. The associated companion report puts the peak at 736 ships in 2033, yielding about 12 million tonnes of scrap steel and staying above 10 million tonnes a year from 2032 to 2037.

That is the circular economy stake. Scrap steel from ships feeds electric arc furnaces rather than blast furnaces, and the earlier NGO Shipbreaking Platform report “Scrap steel at sea” cites industry experts putting the recoverable share of an end-of-life ship’s weight at between 70 and 95 per cent. Two yard investments named in the new report point the same way: a NOK 1.3 billion agreement between Nordic Circles and Höegh Autoliners for up to eight vessels, and a 42 million pound dry-dock expansion at Kishorn Port in Scotland to handle ships up to 260 metres.

Winss has covered adjacent parts of the same policy push in the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation entering into application and in the EU law to make sustainable products the norm, and has looked at where the sorting technology is heading in the Fraunhofer IPA and Polysecure AI robot for mixed textile waste. The shipping sector’s parallel decarbonisation track is set out in how decarbonisation of shipping is happening, fuel by fuel.

About the NGO Shipbreaking Platform

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform was founded in 2005 and is based in Brussels. It describes itself as a coalition of environmental, human rights and labour rights organisations, with 17 member organisations in ten countries, and its stated mission is to advocate for clean, safe and just ship recycling worldwide. Its main output is an annual list of ships dismantled globally, published every year since 2012 and compiled from publicly available data cross-checked against multiple sources. The most recent edition, published on 2 February 2026, recorded 321 vessels dismantled in 2025, 214 of them in South Asia, accounting for 85 per cent of global tonnage, alongside 11 worker deaths and at least 62 injuries.

The organisation’s casualty data has been cited in European Commission documents, including the 2025 evaluation of the Ship Recycling Regulation. Its co-publisher, Transport and Environment, was founded in 1989 as the European Federation for Transport and Environment, is based in Brussels with offices in seven other cities, and groups around 50 member organisations across 24 countries. The capacity report is the pair’s first joint attempt to test the shipowners’ capacity argument against the European List’s own authorised output figures, and it lands while the Commission is still deciding whether to put beaching yards on that list for the first time.

Sources: NGO Shipbreaking Platform and Transport and Environment; Transport and Environment; NGO Shipbreaking Platform; NGO Shipbreaking Platform; Official Journal of the European Union; European Commission; European Commission; Official Journal of the European Union; European Commission; International Maritime Organization; European Community Shipowners’ Associations; European Community Shipowners’ Associations; NGO Shipbreaking Platform; NGO Shipbreaking Platform

Featured image: photo by Wolfgang Weiser on Pexels (free Pexels license).

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Figen Sekin

I specialize in sustainability education, curriculum co-creation, and early-stage project strategy. At WINSS, I craft articles on sustainability, transformative AI, and related topics. When I’m not writing, you’ll find me chasing the perfect sushi roll, exploring cities around the globe, or unwinding with my dog Puffy — the world’s most loyal sidekick.