Big ships are the life blood of world trade, but when they reach the end of their useful life, they go to a place like the Gadani ship-breaker's yard. Along some ten kilometres of Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, where the ground drops away suddenly from the shore, even the biggest tankers and cruise ships can be pulled onto the beach — their bows resting on the sand.
As many as 12,000 people are employed here, mostly by small recycling companies. Using saws, hammers and blowtorches, the workers take each ship apart by hand. Many of them are migrants from the less-developed regions of the country. Far from home and with very little pay, they live in crowded shanty towns a short way inland.
Nothing of value is wasted — steel, copper and other materials are sold off in the nearby megacity of Karachi. An estimated one million tonnes of steel per year is recycled here. In the 1980s, Gadani was the largest ship-breaker's yard in the world, before being overtaken by more modern facilities in India and Bangladesh. It is still one of the world's most dangerous workplaces. Fatal accidents, as well as contamination from the chemicals found in old ships, happen regularly.