Gadani Ship Breaking Yard

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Gadani ship-breaking yard is a large facility in Gadani, Pakistan, located along a 10-kilometer beachfront. It has 132 plots where ships are dismantled and rebuilt for scrap. The yard sits about 40 kilometers northwest of Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city.

In the 1980s, Gadani was the world’s largest ship-breaking yard, with more than 30,000 direct workers. But competition from newer yards in Alang, India, and Chittagong, Bangladesh cut its output. Today Gadani produces less than a fifth of what it did in the 1980s, and it now employs around 6,000 workers. More than one million tons of steel are salvaged each year, much of it sold within Pakistan.

The yard’s best year in recent times was 2009–2010, when 107 ships were broken, totaling about 852,000 tons of ship’s weight. The previous year saw 86 ships broken for about 779,000 tons.

Gadani is the third-largest ship-breaking yard after Alang (India) and Chittagong (Bangladesh), with Aliağa (Turkey) following. It is known for being efficient: a ship of about 5,000 tons is broken in 30 to 45 days here, while similar ships in India or Bangladesh commonly take more than six months.

Ship breaking began in Gadani more actively after Pakistan became independent, growing in the 1960s. In 1978, Gadani was designated a port and was described as the largest yard in the world. Output later fell due to competing yards and high import duties on decommissioned vessels. In the 1980s Gadani produced about one million tonnes of scrap per year, but by 2001 output had dropped and there were months with no new ships arriving. That year, Pakistan reduced ship-breaking duties from 15% to 10% and offered incentives, which helped bring employment back up to around 6,000.

Safety and wages have been a concern. Workers can earn around $12 a day, and the work is dangerous.

On November 1, 2016, a fire and gas cylinder explosions on the tanker Aces killed 26–31 workers and wounded around 58, with more than 100 people involved in dismantling at the yard. In 2017, a second fire occurred on the same vessel. NGO Shipbreaking Platform reported that Aces remained idle for about a year before work resumed, but a fresh fire broke out on the first day of breaking again due to oil residues that had not been removed.