Marie Michael Library

617

DVD

The shantytown of Alang, India, is a place where people live and work in primitive conditions. Since the early 1980s, thousands of the world's largest ships have been sent to Alang, off the Arabian Sea, to be dismantled, piece by piece.  Selling their ships for scrap, the owners rarely abide by the UN Basel Convention, which bans shipments of transboundary waste.  One worker a day, on average, dies on the job, and many will contract cancers caused by asbestos, PCBs and other toxic substances.  This video is an example of Third World ingenuity meeting 21st century global economics.