Shipbreaking provides jobs for tens of thousands of people, as well as cheap raw materials for industry.
Rather like shipbuilding half a century ago, he says, shipbreaking is a boom-and-bust business.
The British government committed itself in 2007 to scrapping its ships properly and is encouraging the development of a British shipbreaking industry.The vagaries of the market can be trying too.
Friends of the Earth, another green group, takes a similar line (although disaffected ex-members have come together in Friends of Hartlepool).If the environmental aspects of shipbreaking are tricky, so are the economic.
Turned away by Spain and Turkey, the ship was slated to be broken up in India, which has a cheap, slapdash and thriving shipbreaking industry.
Another who has worked in the shipbreaking yard for 32 of his 48 years can barely afford to feed his family.
Postwar, half of it was given over to shipbreaking and the other half to a flotilla of pre-nuclear submarines.
Delphine Reuter of the Shipbreaking Platform, an NGO in Brussels, describes ship recycling as "close to slavery".
According to the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking, a coalition of advocacy groups, ship breaking as practiced in South Asia "creates unacceptable levels of death, injury, work-related diseases and environmental pollution".
The frontal "Shipbreaking # 38, Chittagong, Bangladesh" (2001), for instance, is an expressionist abstraction in dark brown and reddish orange.
