Costa Concordia Saga Comes to an End

The dismantling and recycling of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, one of the most important green ship recycling projects ever carried out in Europe, has been finalized in Genoa, according to the Ship Recycling Consortium.

The project was concluded by Italian shipyard San Giorgio del Porto, in partnership with Saipem, less than three years after the ship wreck arrived in Genoa in July 2014.

Up to 350 workers were involved since the start of the dismantling operation which lasted around 1 million effective work hours.

Total recycled material amounted to over 53,000 tons for almost 4,000 trips to recycling facilities in Italy, while the dismantled material amounted to 8,000 tons with over 850 trips to dismantling facilities.

At the beginning of September 2016, the cruise ship’s wreck departed on its final voyage when it sailed to Genoa’s dry dock. The vessel was stripped bare as its internal fitting was removed and its decks were cut after it was moved from its grounding place off the Island of Giglio to the Port of Genoa in 2014.

The Concordia incident, which occurred in January 2012, took the lives of 32 people out of a total of 4,252 who were aboard the ship at the time. The grounding of the cruise ship was believed to had been caused by the captain’s recklessness, as the ship came too close to the Giglio island where it got stuck and later collapsed.