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It's getting sooner and harder than expected. Quality joint typhoon warning crews manning the ships on the busy stretch of water begin to panic the sending out distress signals picked up by the closest Coast Guard, Vietnam. Water plunges over the side of one of the struggling ships, the sea rushes with unstoppable force into the engine room and begins to plummet beneath the waves. Five of the ship's crew end up in the water. Only four make it to shore. Two fishing boats are sent to help.

They also sink. It's chaos. Put it away. Another call comes in. Another cargo ship has been spotted, wrecked on the rocks just down the coast, its massive black and red hull rises up at an odd angle. In the middle, it's cracked and broken. The cranes on board are rocking in time. The way the way emergency rescue teams are calling out on a loudspeaker through the sheeting rain, desperately trying to make contact with its crew.

There's no response. It's a. a ghost ship. There's a name painted on the side, he can just make out the Jakarta. 6000 miles away in the U.K., news of the Jakarta's fate reaches its owner. It turns out the ship was being towed to a beach in India when it broke free in a storm. That's why no one was on board. But as part of the mystery is solved, one question remains unanswered. I want to know why the Jakarta was headed for an Indian beach.

I'm Kate West for this week's assignment. I'm taking you into a secretive world of multi-million pound deals made at sea at incredible speed. Within a few hours, a ship can be given a new identity changing owner, its name and even the laws it must abide by. It's a tale which will follow ships from the U.K. to the beaches of South Asia, where they end up as scrap being broken apart by the poorest people during one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

We live on a planet covered mostly by water, so are the global economy is dependent on the shipping industry. Look around where you are now, down it, your clothes, your shoes at the radio or phone. You can hear me speaking to you from 90 percent of all of these possessions have moved across the sea. The giant vessels that carry out this work become old and time. And each year across the world, around 800 ships are decommissioned and sent for recycling where ship has come to the end of its life.

Essentially, there are two choices. One is to send the ship to a responsible yard, which will safely break up the ship using trained staff who are protected from a lot of the nasty materials on board the ship, like asbestos, which are very damaging to human health. And that ship will be essentially recycled in a yard where it's not going to have a negative effect on the environment.

That's very expensive. Margo Gibs is a journalist who's worked on a number of investigations about the secretive world of the shipping industry.

Now, the other choice is to send them to South Asia. And if you take that option, it's quite lucrative because the steel which forms the ship is valuable. So you can sell a ship for a few million dollars at the end of its life rather than essentially maybe even paying for a ship to be responsibly recycled. And obviously, what happens if you take the more lucrative option is that the ship is being taken apart by workers who are poorly protected and also an environment which is not protected at all.

These ships are so critical to world trade and the systems on which global capitalism depends.

And what happens to them at the end of their lives is therefore quite symbolic.

And it demonstrates how an industry is still very, very happy to dump its waste on poor countries.

70 percent of the world's old ships end up on the beaches of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These are the beaches you'll ever see is a tourist.

The dedicated stretches of muddy sand are dominated by an industry known as shipbreaking.

Ships are sold to companies operating yards along the shore lines, the bigger and heavier the ship, the higher the scrap price it'll fetch.

The carcasses of huge ships litter the beach.

Some clearly have just arrived, while others are little more than skeletons.

The workers, some of them just wearing T-shirts and flip flops, are covered in mud and grime. Sparks and smoke are swirling around their faces as they clamber over the ships, cutting them to pieces. Going to those shipbreaking yards, it's amazing, you hear the metal, you hear it gas curtains, you smell poverty mixed with steel, it's really something else. Ship recycling is a heavy industry. And imagine that being done on a coastline with a beach facility where people are walking through the pieces of steel are being dragged through the sand to the shore for further cutting.

Many of these migrant workers live in crowded shacks nearby, built with scraps from the old ships. Nothing here is wasted. There's a business which takes away the valuable steel, another the plumbing and pipes. The roadsides leading away from these beaches are lined with makeshift shops selling everything that was left inside from oak desks and leather chairs to toilet bedside lamps and ropes. But after a lifetime of heavy operation at sea, there are almost always toxic and dangerous materials also found on board.

Marrin Hugi works for a company called Sea to Cradle as a consultant and responsible ship recycling ships in operation contain quite a lot of hazardous materials that you need to deal with properly when dismantling them.

For example, ozone depleting substances used in cooling systems on board vessels. All the vessels have antifa paint on their hulls to prevent marine growth. It's highly toxic and it basically kills all marine animals that want to attach to the hull.

There's also PCBs and PCBs are highly toxic. Substance stands for political biphenyls. And if that enters your body, it really disrupts your hormone system. And it's also carcinogenic. It has also has the property to bioaccumulate in organisms. So it actually ends up in the fat tissue. Usually at the end of the food chain, it will end up in the fat of cetaceans like dolphins, whales, but also polar bears, for example. So those are some of the examples of the toxic sludge you can find on board of ships.

And it's a matter of locating them and then also make sure that waste is being treated in an environmentally sound manner because of these dangers.

A ship at the end of its life is treated as hazardous waste. It's expensive to dispose of. So having to deal with it responsibly is part of the reason why you can make more money scrapping a ship in South Asia where the same strict rules often don't apply. There are laws in place like the Basel Convention, making it illegal for signatory countries to send their waste to developing countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And European shipowners should only be sending their scrap ships to be broken in EU approved yards.

None of those in South Asia are on that list. Hello, can you hear me?

Hello. Hello. Hello again. Very wonderful. I hear you through a contact.

My producer has an India. I'm speaking on the phone to a man we're calling Chancre. A translator who can speak both English and Hindi is passing our conversation back and forth. Chank is terrified of his bosses finding out he's speaking to us. He's got children, a whole family, depending on his income. So we've changed his name and both voices. You can hear actors. He works in the world's largest ship graveyard. I like. It's a beach on the west coast of India, north of Mumbai.

Barely tohunga has happened but are to clean the ship. Is there more water, oil and gas using a pump? Then this waste is thrown into the sea. We use it also to burn other solid waste and it increases pollution. There is a risk everywhere I work as a cutter. Oil tankers have gases and petrol, so when we cut then there is a chance of explosion. First they used to give us a plastic helmet and a pair of gloves only, but now they provide special shoes and jackets.

Also, I ended up on the phone to chancha for around 45 minutes. He's white in the Indian yards for a number of years and says he earns the equivalent of between six and seven pounds a day. Chancha wants a better wage and better protection while doing such a dangerous job. He's been badly burned before EqualLogic.

On one occasion when I had a serious injury, my manager took me to a nearby hospital. But they said the injuries do serious and I can't be treated there.

So they took me to a bigger town, which is one hour away from here.

My company paid for the expense, but we don't get paid when we don't for. I need to send money every month to my mother and my family when we fall sick. We don't get any money. We should get it.

I've been working on the issue for more than 15 years, and the vast majority of us are still being broken up on the beaches in South Asia. I hope that it's not going to take another 15 years for clean and safe ship. Recycling has become the norm and not the exception.

Engvall Jensen is the director of a campaign group called Shipbreaking Platform. Her team investigates and exposes poor practices of ship recycling, campaigning for change in the industry. Since 2009, they've recorded the deaths of more than 400 workers in South Asia.

The main causes of fatal accidents at these falling steel plates, gas explosions, workers that breathing toxic gases. And thanks for being crushed by steel plates falling down from the vessel. Then on the longer term, you will have workers who have been breathing in toxic fumes or have been exposed to asbestos and become sick.

Many years after having worked at the docks using information published by shipbreaking platform, we've discovered that at least 15 ships with strong ties to the UK ended up on the beaches of South Asia in the last 15 months. That's an average of one ship every month since the start of 2020. But it turns out that the laws in place designed to stop this happening haven't been broken because all the ships we investigated were sold on before they reached the beaches to companies which don't have to operate under the ship recycling requirements of the EU.

We try and put the puzzle together, but you're faced with the registries and the authorities that are not willing to share company names because of very complicated detective work.

Working out who owns a ship is sometimes like opening a Russian doll. You have to unpick layers of companies to find the information you're looking for. And some of these deals are trickier to pry open than others because the information you need isn't always on public record. Now, in the vast majority of cases, ships at the end of their lives are sold on to companies known as cash buyers. These companies specialize in buying older ships and selling them onto the shipbreaking yards for a profit.

These multi-million dollar transactions often happen within hours, and once the ship is owned by a company based outside of the EU, its rules no longer apply.

In some cases, the companies which now own these ships on paper, at least, are based in infamous tax havens like the Cayman Islands. The other important thing to mention is the changing of a ship's flag. The country flag your ship is flying dictates the rules it must abide by. So all ships flying a Spanish flag, for example, must follow Spanish shipping regulations. But a ship's flag is easy to change. Journalist Margot Gips again.

If you had a country that has very weak laws on gambling, you will find lots of gamblers will go there. All UK flagged vessels have to be recycled in responsible yards. The way to circumvent that law is just to reflag to a country which doesn't have those kinds of controls.

In our investigation, we found that ships often began flying the flag of a country with relaxed regulations on ship recycling just before arriving in South Asia. These are known as flags of convenience and with a flag of convenience on your ship is outside of EU waters. EU rules on responsible ship recycling and transporting hazardous waste no longer apply. During peak periods is thought as many as 85000 workers are employed on the shipbreaking beaches of South Asia. Many are drawn from the poorest areas by the prospect of work.

As a young man, Calil Molla left his village in northwest Bangladesh to find a job unable to read or write. He had few opportunities. He traveled to the other side of the country, to the yards, so he could send home money to his wife Hameeda, when he should have.

So surveying, I gather he was a very good person and jolly person. Everybody used to like him because of his goofy characteristics. His routine was seven a.m. to seven p.m. the whole day. And also he used to work most of the time, even on Fridays, which is supposed to be a holy day. He used to work half day. He did not take many off days. Hameeda looks slightly older than her 35 years, her life's been tough, marred by worry and grief.

Her jet black hair is tucked beneath a purple scarf and her bright hazel eyes shine with emotion when she talks about her husband, Khelil. They'd met through her brother, got married, and then Hameeda found out she was expecting. Carlyle's job was to strip items from ships to be resold. He was working to provide for his pregnant wife when he fell from a height onto the muddy beach below.

You know, for medical, you was a terrible time for us because he received only half of his monthly payment from the office. They paid for half of his salary. He was a tough time for us financially. We are not doing very well. You can understand. We were just trying to survive. I had a very hard time taking care of him.

After five months, Khaleel returned to work and the family struggled through the next few years. One afternoon in March 2018, Hameeda was looking after their young son at home when she received a call from Carlile's boss said The foreman called me and told me, Sean's mom, I'm going to tell you something.

So don't drop the call before I finish speaking to you. And then I was holding the phone and he told me that, you know, there was an accident and your husband fell off around 10:00 in the morning and he died. So I did not know where I went. And when I heard the news that the mobile phone fell from my hand and I did not know after that what happened, Khaleel had fallen again.

This time the accident had cost his life. His death was one of twenty recorded in the shipyards of Bangladesh that year alone. Now a widow and single parent to their 11 year old son, Hamin, life's a struggle. But Hamid is determined that their son will never work in the yards.

That, yes, I always tell my son, you have to work hard, study hard, then maybe you will have a better life. But this is very difficult for me to help him continue his study. And with all the daily needs, I'm really trying hard to support team. The ship Khelil fell from what's called the Marren Centaurus, a vessel with links to the UK. In London, British law firm Leigh Day is acting for Hameeda, fighting a U.K. shipping company in court for compensation for the death of her husband.

They claim that even though the company, Marrin UK, had sold the ship before Carlile's fatal fall, it must still take legal responsibility for what happened to him, because by selling to a cash buy, a company must have known the ship would end up in South Asia.

Marren UK declined to comment as the case is ongoing. They asked the Court of Appeal to throw the case out, but last week three judges refused to do that, paving the way for a full trial in London.

Remember that Jakarta, the ship wrecked in the storm while she was on the way to India when she broke free, her owners are a UK based so-called cash buy, a company called Encaged Maritime. Some of the Indian yards have been working to try and meet the standards required by the EU. You often won't make as much money scrapping in India as you would in Pakistan or Bangladesh. As a general rule, the higher the price you can fetch, the lower the standards.

And KDDI has a business relationship with one of these more expensive yards in India, and that's where the Jakarta is heading heading. Gruman is a ship recycling consultant. He's worked with a number of yards in India that are trying to get EU approval.

I would definitely not say that a ship can go to any place, and it always depends on the individual yacht. And we have substandard yachts who are the direct neighbours of top notch yachts. And if you see what some of these yachts are doing from the standards they are following, they are at least on the same level, like many issues of recycling glass.

But despite the efforts of some of the yards in Alang, none have been approved by the EU. So UK ship owners shouldn't be sending their ships to any yard in India, even if it's one of the better ones. There's two main reasons they've been turned down by EU regulators. There's no suitable hospital built close to the workers. Should they be injured? Remember Chancre, the worker we spoke to earlier, he said he had to be taken to a hospital an hour away when he was badly burned.

And the other problem is what's known as downstream waste management. She's basically what happens to toxic and dangerous materials once they're taken off the ships. The odds say these problems are out of their hands and it's up to the government to sort out where hospitals are built and what happens to toxic waste in the country. While the arguments are ongoing, the ships continue to arrive, including one so popular it even had its own TV program.

Cruise ship Marco Polo is a model of maritime history. Her classic outline recalls the heyday of the grand ocean liners. She was launched back in 1965, a luxury ship built for the hard line regime of the old Soviet Union, the Marco Polo was one of the world's last surviving ocean cruise liners built back in the 60s until last year.

The ship was operated by a UK cruise company departing from ports around England and Scotland.

It wasn't the kind of cruise where you get dressed up in a ball gown every night. The Marco Polo experience was more down to earth, had a few bars, buffets and traditional cruise entertainment shows running twice a day. The ship recently hit the headlines after a British couple were found guilty of smuggling cocaine with a street value of a million pounds in the lining of their suitcases.

The Marco Polo just arrived from the Caribbean in Cabin four six nine Roger and Sue Clark. Today, the couple, both 72 years old, were brought to court in handcuffs, sentenced to eight years each for drug smuggling.

At the start of the pandemic, cruise ships emerged as some of the first major hot spots for outbreaks of the coronavirus spined disastrous for the industry going once.

The British company operating the Marco Polo went into administration over the summer, going twice, and the ship was sold at auction to an offshore company sold for two million pounds.

The company, which bought the Marco Polo, says the plan was for the cruise liner to be sold on again and used as a floating hotel in Dubai. But that never happened. She left Dubai and began her final voyage to the shipwreck beach of Alang in India. The cruise ship industry is normally very public image conscious, and these passenger ships tend to end up in EU approved yards like those in Edinburgh, Belfast and Turkey after it was sold at auction.

The decision of where the ship ended up was taken out of the UK owner's hands. Ship recycling consultant Muran Hergé says the Marco Polo has a potential to cause real harm in India, in particular because of one type of dangerous material that could be on board if you were to have a vessel built in the 60s.

It is likely that there are larger amounts of asbestos on board. There's a ban on asbestos in Europe, but in India, it's freely being traded. This actually means that asbestos panels, for example, from ships are being traded and being sold and used as second hand building materials instead of being brought to a landfill for disposal. Asbestos is not seen as a hazardous waste all over the world. So we in Europe, we know that exposure to the virus, you can develop lung cancer, all kinds of really serious diseases with that as a result, but not in all countries.

This is recognised and the tide is bringing in more former UK cruise ships to Alang. We need to have a tighter regulatory framework, but it needs to be international.

Luke Pollard is the UK's shadow environment secretary. He thinks enforceable global regulations needed to tackle this issue.

By its very nature, commercial shipping travels across borders. And so we need it to be a global approach rather than just something that the United Kingdom adopts by itself. But at the moment, you know, the patchwork quilt of regulation around the world, a sense that actually if a ship's broken up in the developing world, it matters less. These type of approaches can't be something that is allowed to stand.

My work involves risk, but I don't have any other option as I need to feed my family. Chunka, the shipbreaking worker we spoke to in India, says his job puts him at risk every day, so he really didn't need to take another one by speaking to us, but he did. He wants to tell his story and make a plea for better pay and working conditions for himself and for the men he works alongside on board these ships like another Jumoke.

Welcome to have been given a chance. I want to leave this job and get a better one. When we fall sick. We don't get any money. We should get it. I want a better life. Don't let things pass you by. I try to live for the future, we're stronger together.

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