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By Bulent Usta ALIAGA, Turkey, Oct 2 (Reuters) \u2013 Business is booming at a sea dock in western Turkey, where five hulking cruise ships are being dismantled for scrap metal sales after the COVID-19 pandemic all but destroyed the industry, the head of a ship recyclers\u2019 group said on Friday.<\/p>\n
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Cruise ships were home to the some of the earliest clusters of COVID-19 as the pandemic spread globally early this year.<\/p>\n
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In March, U.S. authorities issued a no-sail order for all cruise ships that remains in place.<\/p>\n
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On Friday, dozens of workers stripped walls, windows, floors and railings from several vessels in the dock in Aliaga, a town 45 km north of Izmir on Turkey\u2019s west coast. Three more ships are set to join those already being dismantled.<\/p>\n
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Before the pandemic, Turkey\u2019s ship-breaking yards typically handled cargo and container ships, Kamil Onal, chairman of a ship recycling industrialists\u2019 association, told Reuters.<\/p>\n
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\u201cBut after the pandemic, cruise ships changed course towards Aliaga in a very significant way,\u201d he said of the town. \u201cThere was growth in the sector due to the crisis. When the ships couldn\u2019t find work, they turned to dismantling.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Onal said some 2,500 people worked at the yard in teams that take around six months to dismantle a full passenger ship. The vessels arrived from Britain, Italy and the United States.<\/p>\n
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The shipyard aims to increase the volume of dismantled steel to 1.1 million tonnes by the end of the year, from 700,000 tonnes in January, he said.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe are trying to change the crisis into an opportunity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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Even the ships\u2019 non-metal fittings do not go to waste as hotel operators have come to the yard to buy useful materials, he added. (Reporting by Bulent Usta; Writing by Daren Butler and Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Barbara Lewis)<\/p>\n
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(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Bulent Usta ALIAGA, Turkey, Oct 2 (Reuters) \u2013 Business is booming at a sea dock in western Turkey, where five hulking cruise ships are being dismantled for scrap metal sales after the COVID-19 pandemic all but destroyed the industry, the head of a ship recyclers\u2019 group said on Friday. Cruise ships were home to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[10537,1153,1070,1041,547],"class_list":["post-18734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-booming","tag-cruise","tag-ship","tag-shipbreaking","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/18735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}