Chittagong Ship-Breaking Beach at Sitakunda
Visit the extraordinary ship-breaking yards of Sitakunda north of Chittagong — where supertankers, container ships, and ocean liners are manually dismantled on the beach by tens of thousands of workers, one of the world's most dramatic industrial landscapes and a crucial part of the global recycling economy.
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Sitakunda Ship-Breaking Approach
Drive north of Chittagong along the coastal road where the scale of the ship-breaking industry becomes visible — enormous rusting hulls stranded on the beach at various stages of dismantlement, stretching for miles along the shoreline.
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Active Dismantling Site
Observe the working ship-breaking process from the road — workers with cutting torches, the crash of heavy metal sections, the recycling of every component from engines to porthole glass to the steel hull itself, sold to Bangladesh's re-rolling mills.
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Ship Parts Market
The market near the yards where every component of dismantled ships is sold — portholes, navigation equipment, life jackets, ship's bells, engine parts, and steel plate of every thickness, much of it finding new uses in Bangladeshi construction and industry.
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Workers' Settlement
The settlement where ship-breaking workers live in temporary accommodation near the yards — workers who come from across Bangladesh for the relatively high wages, despite the documented occupational hazards of cutting asbestos-lined hulls.
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Beached Hull Close View
The most striking visual of the ship-breaking landscape: enormous ocean-going vessels lying on their sides on the beach, their massive scale apparent only when compared to the human figures working on the hull with cutting equipment.
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Chittagong Steel Market
The wholesale steel market in Chittagong where re-rolled ship steel is sold in standardized bar and sheet form — Bangladesh's construction boom is substantially powered by recycled ship steel, making this industry central to the national economy.