Improving ship design process to enhance ship recycling

The ship design process is primarily influenced by operational requirements stipulated by the ship owner, safety requirements stipulated by international regulations such as MARPOL, SOLAS, IMO codes etc. and production requirements specified by the shipyard. Unfortunately, the final phase of a ship’s lifecycle i.e. recycling is usually not part of this process. An improved design, not just in terms of easy to dismantle structure but also in terms of easily available information at the end of ship’s life, can facilitate safe and environmentally sound ship recycling. The information about ship’s materials can be stored in ship documents as early as during the design stage. Presently, this might be obtained from the lightweight distribution given in the ship’s stability manual. Unfortunately, it is neither standardized nor quite extensive enough. This paper proposes a new format of lightweight distribution in order to store such critical information for ship recyclers.