Every ship in this directory that is not preserved will, in the end, be broken up. Scrapping — the industry increasingly prefers "recycling" — is a normal stage of a ship's life: a hull is mostly steel, steel has value, and a ship that can no longer earn more than she costs to keep legal, safe and saleable is worth more as material than as a vessel. What follows is how that decision is reached, where the work is done, and why the process remains controversial.
The decision
Ships rarely die of old age alone. They die of arithmetic. The triggers are usually a combination of age — most cruise ships are designed for a commercial life of roughly thirty years — the rising cost of surveys and drydockings needed to keep an old hull in class, and the step-change cost of meeting new rules. Fire safety is the classic example: successive tightenings of SOLAS, notably the requirements that older ships meet modern sprinkler, detection and escape standards, have repeatedly set a date by which a generation had to be expensively rebuilt or retired. Fuel works the same way: an elderly ship with thirsty machinery cannot compete with a new one on the same itinerary, however beloved she is.
Market conditions decide the timing. In a strong market, old ships are sold down — to smaller lines, new entrants and charterers — and live on. In a collapse, the second-hand market disappears with the revenue, and ships go from service to the breakers in months. That is what happened in 2020, when the Covid-19 shutdown stopped the industry at once.
Cash buyers and the final voyage
Owners seldom deal with a breaking yard directly. The ship is typically sold, through a broker, to a "cash buyer" — a specialist intermediary that pays the owner, takes the commercial risk, and resells the ship to a yard for a margin. The price is quoted per light displacement ton: a cruise ship is, in effect, sold by weight. Before delivery, the owner strips what the breaking price does not include or what can be sold separately — artwork, pianos, silver, spare parts, sometimes whole fittings — and the ship is delivered, under her own power with a skeleton crew, on her final voyage to the yard. Her name is often shortened or changed for that last passage, a legal and commercial formality rather than a disguise.
Where ships are broken
Four locations dominate the world trade. Alang, in Gujarat, India, is the largest shipbreaking centre in the world, a long beach of intertidal plots. Chattogram (formerly Chittagong), in Bangladesh, handles a comparable share and built much of its local steel industry on recycled plate. Gadani, in Pakistan, works a smaller, similar beach. Aliağa, in Turkey, near İzmir, is different in kind: its yards work from fixed plots with concrete and cranes rather than open tidal beach, and Turkey is where most cruise ships of the last decade have gone.
The geography of the Covid wave explains why. When Pullmantur collapsed and Carnival Corporation accelerated its fleet disposals in 2020, the ships sold were largely European-owned, European-flagged or European-operated, and the European rules described below sharply limited where they could legally be recycled. Aliağa was close — a short final voyage from Mediterranean lay-up berths — and its yards were on the EU's approved list. So the extraordinary sight of 2020–21, near-new-looking cruise ships nosed into a Turkish shore, followed directly from regulation and distance: Pullmantur's Sovereign and Monarch, formerly Royal Caribbean's Sovereign of the Seas and Monarch of the Seas, were beached at Aliağa in July 2020, and Carnival's Carnival Fantasy, the oldest ship in that fleet, followed the same month, with her sisters Carnival Inspiration and Carnival Imagination behind her.
Beaching and alongside breaking
At Alang, Chattogram and Gadani the traditional method is beaching. The ship is driven at speed onto a gently shelving tidal shore at high water, so she grounds upright on the mud. As the tide falls, workers reach the hull; cutting proceeds from the top down, the ship is winched further ashore as she lightens, and the last sections are dismantled where she grounded. The method needs almost no infrastructure, which is its commercial advantage and the root of its environmental problem: everything that falls, leaks or is cut away lands on the shore or in the sea.
Alongside and dry-dock breaking — the method used in Turkey, Europe and the United States — keeps the ship afloat or in a dock while she is cut down in a contained area, cranes lifting sections ashore. It is slower, dearer, and the only method compatible with the stricter regimes.
The rules: Europe and the Hong Kong Convention
The EU Ship Recycling Regulation requires large sea-going ships flying an EU member-state flag to be recycled only at facilities on the European List of approved yards, which must meet set standards for worker safety, containment and downstream waste handling. The list began with European yards and was later extended to approved yards in Turkey — the Aliağa facilities — and one in the United States; no South Asian beach yard is on it, which is why EU-flag cruise ships did not go to Alang even when Alang would have paid more.
The global counterpart is the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, adopted by the IMO in 2009. After its entry-into-force conditions were met in June 2023, the Convention entered into force on 26 June 2025. It requires ships to carry an Inventory of Hazardous Materials, requires recycling yards to be authorised and to prepare a ship-specific recycling plan, and places duties on flag states, port states and recycling states alike. It does not, however, ban beaching, and that omission is the central point its critics press.
What is salvaged
A cruise ship is broken twice: first by the memorabilia and second-hand trade, then by the cutters. Anything reusable has a market. Hotel equipment — kitchen plant, laundry machinery, lifeboats, tenders, generators, furniture — is sold into secondary markets ashore and afloat. Fittings with a ship's name on them, from crockery and menus to builder's plaques and commissioned artwork, feed an established collectors' market, and a famous ship's fittings can disperse worldwide within months. Whole interiors occasionally survive in bars and hotels. What remains — the great majority by weight — is steel, cut into plate and sold to re-rolling mills, along with non-ferrous metals, cabling and machinery.
The controversy, stated honestly
Shipbreaking has a human and environmental record that cannot be written around. The beach yards of South Asia have historically employed large numbers of migrant workers, often informally, in work that involves falls, falling steel, fires and exposure to the hazardous materials an old ship contains — asbestos, oils, heavy-metal paints and, in older tonnage, PCBs. Fatal accidents have been documented year after year, and pollution of the intertidal zone at beaching yards is not disputed by anyone who has seen one. Defenders of the South Asian yards reply, with some force, that the industry provides employment and cheap steel to economies that need both, that conditions at the better yards have improved under Hong Kong Convention standards, and that prices paid there are higher precisely because labour and compliance cost less. Both things are true at once: the same ship, sent to Aliağa rather than Alang, earns her owner less and exposes fewer people to less risk, and the industry has never resolved who should bear that difference. Cruise ships, because their owners are visible consumer brands, now tend to go to the more regulated yards — and the Covid wave at Aliağa, photographed ship by ship, is part of the reason that tendency hardened.
Sources: https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/hottopics/pages/recycling-of-ships-and-the-hong-kong-convention.aspx; https://cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/2021/01/these-cruise-ships-are-being-scrapped-in-aliaga/; https://maritime-executive.com/article/eu-adds-first-overseas-yards-to-ship-recycling-list; https://shipbreakingplatform.org/issues-of-interest/the-law/hkc/