Alang is the place where the world's ships go to die, and the reason they die here rather than anywhere else is a tide. The Gulf of Khambhat narrows like a funnel on the west coast of India, and the water driven up it produces one of the highest tidal ranges on Earth, around 13 meters. That single fact of geography is what built the largest ship-breaking yard in the world on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Gujarat mudflat.

How a ship dies here. When a cargo ship, tanker, or bulk carrier reaches the end of its working life, it is sold to a recycler and sailed to Alang under its own power for the last time. At high tide it is lined up offshore and then run straight at the beach at full speed, driving its bow as far up the mud as momentum will carry it. Then the tide goes out, and the enormous tidal range leaves the ship sitting high and dry on the flat, accessible on foot. Crews climb it with oxy-acetylene torches and cut it apart from the top down, dropping steel plate to the ground where cranes and gangs drag it off to be re-rolled into rebar for India's construction industry. Almost nothing is wasted: the steel, the machinery, the furniture, the fittings, all of it is salvaged and resold. The yard is a 14-kilometer line of roughly 183 separate cutting plots, and it dismantles more than a third of the world's retired oceangoing ships.

Who does the work. The dismantling is done overwhelmingly by hand, by a workforce on the order of 20,000, most of them migrants from poorer Indian states, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha. They live in shanty settlements behind the plots and many return to their villages to farm during the monsoon, when the yard slows. The work is brutal and dangerous. Between January 2009 and October 2012, local union figures recorded at least 54 deaths in accidents at Alang, and that count captures only the acute toll, not the slower damage of asbestos exposure, which causes disease years later. The hazards are constant: steel plate falling from height, explosions when torches meet residual fuel or gas in a tank, and the asbestos and heavy metals built into the older ships. The recycling contaminates the mud and the water with heavy metals. For most of the yard's history the nearest full hospital was 50 kilometers away in Bhavnagar; a dedicated hospital did not open at Alang until March 2019.

The famous dead. Because Alang takes the largest ships, it has taken some of the most storied hulls in history. The Seawise Giant, the longest ship ever built, was broken up here in December 2009. The Exxon Valdez, by then renamed Oriental Nicety, was scrapped here in August 2012, more than two decades after it fouled Prince William Sound. And in 2006 the asbestos-laden French aircraft carrier Clemenceau was sent toward Alang and turned back by India's Supreme Court, a case that became the defining global argument about whether a rich country may export its most toxic ships to a poorer country's coast for cheap disposal.

The slow formalization. That argument has been reshaping Alang. Under pressure from the Basel Convention on hazardous waste and years of campaigning, the maritime industry negotiated the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, which finally entered into force on 26 June 2025. By then 115 of Alang's 128 active plots held compliance certification, the result of Japanese-funded upgrades begun in 2017, impermeable floors, cranes, protective equipment, and waste-handling that did not exist a decade earlier. Critics, including the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, argue that the beaching method is inherently unsafe and polluting and that certification risks legitimizing it rather than ending it. The yard is measurably safer than it was, and it is still a tidal flat where men cut apart poisoned ships by hand.

What it is, now. And it may be fading. By late 2025, with fewer ships arriving and plots sitting idle, observers were describing Alang as a dying industry even as it finished certifying itself. Whatever happens to it, Alang stands as the clearest physical fact of global shipping: that every vessel eventually becomes a beach full of hazardous steel, and that for forty years the cheapest place on Earth to deal with that fact was a Gujarat mudflat, and the cost was carried by the tide and by the men who worked it.