Ship recycling market is certainly one of increasing growth but also one with growing concerns about environmental safety, health and welfare matters. At the end of this decade, some 4.000 ships with an aggregate gross tonnage of 24 million are expected to be recycled. These figures warrant a thoroughly structured approach to the ship recycling issue by the maritime industry as a whole. Having considered the recently adopted IMO Resolution A.962 (Dec. 2003) outlining guidelines on ship recycling, the Basel Convention as well as safety and health guidelines in ship breaking developed by the International Labor Organization (ILO), this research project aims to:

• Develop innovative dismantling and recycling procedures consisting of optimal design of a prototype ship dismantling site, and optimization of ship breaking facilities and dismantling processes with respect to environmental and energy issues, cost, as well as occupationally hazards concerns. The above will also be applied to cases concerning basic improvement of already operational ship breaking yards, which may be active in full or partial dismantling.

• Develop a Decision Support System (DSS) for the ship breaking industry, which will be released free of charge to all stakeholders worldwide. The DSS will take into consideration the existing capacity and dismantling methodology of a given ship breaker, the type and the particular characteristics of the dismantling ship, and diverse third parties reports (including the inventory report of hazardous material on board), and it will outline the dismantling process in an environmentally sound, cost and energy effective way, taking into consideration the health and safety of the workers. It is estimated that the implementation of the DSS will lead to a reduction of manufacturing costs by 20%-30%.

• Support the decision of acceptance of a given obsolete vessel for dismantling at a given site based on the comparison of the available against the required infrastructure.

• Validate the proposed tools and methodologies through a real case study. The larger Turkish ship-breaker will first improve its facilities and modify its infrastructure and dismantling processes according to the outcomes of the project. Then, through a real case of a particular vessel, it will follow the overall dismantling scheme proposed (DSS and methodologies), the aim being to evaluate it with respect to environmental impact, working conditions, productivity, energy and cost effectiveness, according to properly defined metrics.
Respecting the guidelines for an environmentally sound management of full and partial dismantling of ships (prepared by the Secretariat of Basel Convention), the proposed approach implements the basic guidelines in a scientifically driven way.

In addition it adopts the currently accepted two-stages dismantling practice including an initial pre-cleaning phase, and integrates advanced “hard” and “soft” technologies to offer a customized approach to the dismantling process.