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On the beaches of Sitakunda in Bangladesh you find a special type of retirement home.

This is where ships go to die, beaching on the sand before their carcasses are ripped apart and recycled for steel and other materials.

And there is about to be a retirement boom.

As Md. Tahmid Zami reports from Sitakunda, in the next decade about 15,000 ships will come into yards like these, representing about an eighth of the world’s current fleet.

Were it a country, the global fleet would have the dubious honour of being the world's No. 6 emitter of planet-warming carbon dioxide.

The old ships are the worst culprits, so accelerating their retirement has become a priority for a sector that is making pledges to become green, industry members told Tahmid.

South Asian countries break about 85% to 90% of decommissioned ships. It's good business for the shipyards, but dangerous for their workers.

"Cutting ships is one of the riskiest jobs on earth," said Jamal Uddin, 40, who works as a senior cutter in his local yard.

Far from a sophisticated process, many of the tasks facing shipbreaking in Bangladesh are done by hand on beached ships in difficult conditions.

Many old ships have hazardous waste like asbestos and chemicals that pose serious health dangers to the workers scrapping them.

And according to one estimate, 470 workers have been killed in accidents in ship breaking yards since 2009.

There are moves afoot at the United Nations, with a new international Hong Kong convention coming into force in June to improve the sector's safety and environmental record.

But activists want more radical changes, like phasing out the old-fashioned beaching method and for ship owners - mostly from wealthy nations - to provide more funding and technical support.

"The world's rich countries benefit from international shipping. They need to care and act on how the ships are recycled and what happens to the workers," said Mohammad Ali of the Bangladesh Metalworkers' Federation.

For workers like Jamal Uddin, the speed of these changes could be a matter of life and death.

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