NDTV,
A Supreme Court monitoring committee will meet on Friday to decide on the French aircraft carrier, Clemeanceau, which will be broken up and sold as scrap in India.
The decommissioned ship contains over a thousand metric tonnes of asbestos, a carcinogenic agent believed to be hazardous for the environment.
The ship is expected to arrive at a ship-breaking yard in Gujarat in about three weeks.
A team of Gujarat Environment Protection and Infrastructure Ltd will submit a report to the Gujarat Maritime Board on how hazardous the ship is.
Toxic cargo
Under European law, France should extract most of the asbestos and dump it on French soil.
The French government claims it removed 115 tonnes of asbestos from the ship. But going by an earlier official estimate, 105 tonnes could still be left on board.
Ironically, almost a year ago, the French government declared that the ship had only 22 tonnes of asbestos left.
Technopure, a company which had removed some of the asbestos from the carrier, says there could be as much as “500 tonnes to 1000 tonnes” remaining on the ship.
Another French company, SDI, which bought the carrier for 100,000 euros, has refused to release an inventory of what all is in the ship. That is something, which could help locate the asbestos.
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