Ignore the alarmists and send us your rotting hulks

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are rendering a profound disservice to the environmental cause by promoting the hysterical reporting of "ghost ships" heading for Hartlepool for dismantling. The language the two green organisations use to describe the former US Navy ships is grossly misleading. Friends of the Earth calls them toxic timebombs; Greenpeace says they contain cocktails of hazardous substances. They might just as well apply such terms to any 1960s block of flats scheduled for demolition or to written-off old cars heading for the scrapyard.

The toxicity, in this case, largely consists of asbestos and PCBs, both of which were used routinely in ships until the 1970s, just as they were on land. Asbestos was used as fireproof insulation, and PCBs are chemicals that were commonly used in paints and plastics such as electrical cables.

Because they are dangerous both to human health and to the natural environment, they have to be disposed of securely. But that is why the 13 ageing ships should be dismantled by people who know what they are doing and who are regulated by a state with high environmental standards, which is precisely what is proposed.

The Hartlepool contract is regulated by the British Environment Agency, and so far its only objection has been that the contractor, Able UK, has not yet obtained all the legal permissions it needs to build the dry dock that would allow the work to be done. Until the intervention of the misdirected green lobby - and the disgracefully opportunist Caroline Spelman, the Conservative environment spokeswoman - no one suggested there was any reason for this hitch apart from bureaucratic delay.

If the alarmist campaign to block the disposal of these ships in Britain were to succeed, the effect would at best be bad for British jobs and at worst it would be bad for the environment too. This contract would presumably go elsewhere, but - more important - it would then be harder for other less well-regulated ship owners to dispose of other vessels like them.

If this campaign succeeds, more ships will be left to rot in some part of the world not blessed with well-intentioned but ill-informed environmental activists.