Shipbreaking has always been dirty and dangerous work. For years it was performed under inhospitable working conditions, in countries where legal protection for workers was not strong. Then the Hong Kong Convention (HKC) for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships became effective in June of 2025. That changed things. Now there is clear international law marking how recycling yards must operate if they want to handle the world’s discarded ships.
Bangladesh is the largest ship-recycling state, with many facilities, and much tonnage recycled into scrap steel and other by-products. The government has drafted new Ship Recycling Rules 2025, to assure that their recycling yards are compliant with both Bangladesh law and with the HKC. And these rules have been receiving some criticism.
The opinion piece linked below, by a prominent Bangladeshi professor and ship-recycling expert, debunks that criticism. It seems that Bangladesh has managed to thread the needle, creating a legal structure that will support compliant shipbreakers, while giving noncompliant facilities a chance and a time window to become compliant. And it’s done in a way that will not allow the noncompliant yards to persist in a rogue fashion.
The law should be welcomed by the shipping community. Bangladesh is a preferred location for shipbreaking because of its ideal geographical setting and better cost profile. A rising tide of scrapping is coming, because of the need to improve environmental characteristics of ships, and an oversupply created by a newbuilding splurge. Bangladesh needs to be included in the roster of decent places to recycle ships.
The Getting to Zero Coalition and the Global Maritime Forum have issued a new report At a Crossroads: Annual Progress Report on Green Shipping Corridors 2025. Green shipping corridors are a very impactful way of moving toward zero emissions in the maritime area. They can coordinate many players by providing a specific attainable goal— zero emissions on a specific route for specific ship types. These corridors are independent of efforts by the EU to create incentives and penalties for carbon emissions and reductions, and of efforts by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to reach a consensus on rules and measures for intrnational ocean shipping. Many times they are organized by specific ports and specific ocean carriers. Often they try to focus efforts on supply chains for specific fuels at those ports.
I think these efforts are extremely important. They can show how to provide reasonably priced fuel supply chains and how to coordinate investors, ocean shipping players, and financial institutions as well as governments. These experiments need to be tried.
The report has been published since 2022, effectively the beginning of the green shipping corridors movement. Steady gains have been made, and today there are 84 initiatives catalogued, with 305 stakeholders. 25 more initiatives have been recorded.
Source: Annual Progress Report on Green Shipping Corridors, 2025.
An interesting section discussed progress at the four corridors that have reached the highest stage in the journey: the Realization stage. Three of them are short-sea routes in Europe. The longest runs bulkers from Australia to China and other Far East ports.
Stockholm-Turku ferry, Finland to Sweden, biomethane;
Vaasa-Umeå ferry, Finland to Sweden, biomethane;
Australia-East Asia bulk carriers, iron ore, ammonia;
Oslo-Rotterdam container ships, hydrogen.
I found it interesting that the three short routes fund the difference between green and dirty fuels by entering pooling agreements to sell credits to other shipping lines, under the EU policies. The long ammonia route alone is driven by private firms involved in the trade, to help them meet dramatically lower emissions goals, with fuel costs not funded but expected to drop to a reasonable level as the infrastructure is built out. China, Korea, and Japan all have goals for reduced emissions from shipping which the iron ore route will help with.
Four recommendations emerge from the report’s assessment of the green corridor potential and progress.
Pursuing strategies to break the inertia and keep the momentum;
Connecting cargo owner willingness to pay to the corridors;
Taking an active stance at the IMO;
Tapping into or replicating emerging national policy instruments.
Significant issues for now are:
Delay of the IMO Net-Zero framework; participants may wait for more clarity.
Will the cargo owner be willing to pay for green shipping on the corridor? The evidence so far is not good.
Influencing public policies to support investment and regulation.
Staying focused on truly green corridors that deploy zero-emission assets rather than fossil fuels, do it early, and iron out the kinks.
This chart shows the right and wrong approaches:
Source: Annual Progress Report on Green Shipping Corridors, 2025, page 25
The study is available in PDF at this link. It contains an Appendix listing all the current Green Corridors in the portfolio at present.
I was very happy to read this summary of the state of green corridor adoption. Keeping this movement going will play an important part in maritime decarbonization.
Gary Howard, Middle East correspondent November 27, 2025
Ships are changing their flag registry much more often than they used to. Much of this is because the older ships are gravitating to the ‘dark’ or ‘shadow’ fleet, which specializes in avoiding sanctions.
Many of these newly popular flag states have few regulations and little power to provide oversight on the registered ships. That’s what some ship operators want.
In addition, changing flags frequently circumvents enforcement by anyone. The law of the sea is that each ship is nominally required to enforce the laws of its flag state. But some of the flag states have no relevant laws, or very weak ones, and provide no means of enforcement. And jumping flags means that even if some enforcement is tried, it will likely not apply to the vessel by the time the complaint is heard.
African states are frequent choices of shipowners who choose to use alternate flagging. Aside from Liberia, a major flag state, which has a robust governance, many African states use flagging as a revenue source with no actions required. This threatens safety, environmental disaster, and seafarer welfare. The chart below from Clarkson’s, obtained from the article linked below, shows how changes in African registry have ramped up.
The flag-jumping is connected to the fracture in the shipping world between those operators aligned with the EU, US and the West, and those aligned with Russia, to some extent China, and other sanctioned states such as Iran. It’s likely to continue as long as the fracture intensifies.
Management of shipping, safety on board and in port, and welfare of seafarers, is taking a back seat in the meantime.
Supply Chain and Logistics 