NFB
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2024
1:12:52 · 5.8M views · Jun 21, 2017
An NFB documentary about the shipbreaking yards of Alang, India, where about 40,000 people dismantle huge ships by hand in dangerous conditions.
HN recommends it for an up-close look at the shipbreaking industry.
4 comments from Hacker News
I worked in Bangladesh for 3 years, and it is such a land of contrasts. The main electricity supply company at the time was running manual billings from a big room filled with manual general ledgers, one “T” account per household. It is a humbling, impoverished country with its main riches being its resilient, kind, resourceful people. Down the road/bay from Chittagong are the shipwrecking yards - a big time investment but worth watching is this… this video <edit> the film I am looking for is Iron Eaters, a very human view of the horrific shipyards. The above film is from India, but still worth looking at.
The cutting apart of ships at their end of life in salvage shipbreaker junkyards is fascinating, terrifying, and sad in equal parts. This (and similar) documentaries of the salvage beaches in India show a lot of interior cutting: this video It’s a stark juxtaposition from these shots of clean, carefully planned and engineered operations in high-tech ports. Shipbreaking is often done freehand, based on experience and intuition, without much in the way of reference documents or safety gear.
Someone posted this hour long documentary on shipbreaking in the comments a while back. Both mortifying and fascinating to see this industry up close. this video
> something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals' Better than shipbreaking. this video