Ship Breaker

"This is a marvellous novel as well, and a little bit different from the other books I’ve talked about. It’s considered a young adult novel, but that categorisation surprises me as it’s often violent and deals with some very adult themes. One of the reasons why I wanted to include it is because when so many people think about this industry, they think about the trash compactor room in Star Wars . Junkyards often seem to appear in futuristic science fiction, and I think that’s because we know there’s going to be a price paid for our wastefulness at some point. Ship Breaker is about a young ship breaker called Nailer, a couple of hundred years in the future on the Gulf Coast of the US. The book opens with descriptions of ship breaking yards, which are obviously based on real ship breaking yards in India, only now it’s the US which has been plunged into the poverty of having to do this kind of work. And better than journalists who have written about this, Paolo Bacigalupi describes this work – what it’s like to go into these ships, and crawl around in these tight spaces and airducts, pullling out wire, and how you can end up dead very quickly if you aren’t careful doing it. It also brings up resource scarcity. These ships are being extracted of raw materials for unseen corporations with big names who need them. Paolo Bacigalupi calls them “blood buyers”. I like the book not only for being a thriller, but also because of the descriptions of how dangerous this work is, while someone else is getting rich off it. It brings that feeling home on a very gut level. I think we’re going to see a lot more intensive recycling, and a lot more money made from recycling. One of the images from Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel that I found troubling and yet so very real is that when people are breaking these ships two hundred years in the future, if they find pockets of oil in the ships, a couple of buckets of it is enough to buy their freedom from whoever has bonded them, because oil has become so valuable, along with all the other materials that we have built the modern world on. I don’t think oil’s going to be worth as much as Ship Breaker predicts, but I do believe that as the developing world wants more and more of the stuff that we as consumers have enjoyed in the developed world, the price of these materials is going to go up as they become scarcer. There is a limited amount of copper. There is a limited amount of steel, or of oil to turn into plastic. I can’t say when this stuff is going to run out, but I can say that it’s worth a whole lot more today than it was 30 years ago. And as it becomes worth more, there’s more money in it for people who do the business – which is going to drive more recycling. Scrap is a far bigger part of our lives than most of us realise. I still cover this industry, and every so often I find out about something else that is recycled and transformed into another product that I had no idea about. Recycling is not a new, revolutionary idea – it’s an activity that has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in fact much further back."