Germany soon has its first sustainable ship recycling facility. Leviathan GmbH is pleased to announce that we have signed a lease contract with the Hanseatic City of Stralsund, Germany, in the Maritime Industrial and Commercial Park Volkswerft. This enables us to open Germany’s first and dedicated ship recycling facility.
For Lord Mayor Dr. Alexander Badrow, who announced the news today (12 September) during a business forum at the Maritime Industrial and Commercial Park Volkswerft Stralsund, this day marks the beginning of a new era: "With Leviathan, we are taking a big step further towards a multifunctional, broad-based Volkswerft that combines maritime tradition with new technologies."
“We are excited to take this next step in Leviathan’s journey to build a state-of-the-art ship recycling facility, that contributes to Europe’s circular economy by providing green steel to be recycled by steel mills” says Leviathan’s Managing Partner Karsten Schumacher.
“The new facility offers us distinct advantages. With a 300m ship lift, and a 140m long workshop, we have a lot of options at our disposal. We have developed our proof-of-concept in Kiel and can dismantle ships efficiently, cleanly and almost without CO2-emissions. Now we are in the process to further improve our automation. We still have a lot of ideas to further develop, build, and test. Our robots, computers and pumps are well suited to work outside, but testing, tinkering and development is always easier for our people in a protected environment.“
Leviathan has an existing vessel to recycle and a number of other smaller ships in the pipeline for our scheduled trial and development phase. There is a clear signal from vessel owners that there is strong demand for Leviathan’s services.
Karsten continues to say, “We are pleased to see interest from owners of smaller ships (up to 50m length), as these are well suited for our technology refinement process”. The next operational development phase will focus on refining the process, so that the facility can be enhanced to accept vessels up to 140m in length. Leviathan will then scale up the technology to enable recycling of vessels up to 350m.
“Exciting times are ahead of us” adds Simeon Hiertz, “We will start a recruitment campaign in the coming months, not only for Stralsund, but also for our headquarters in Bremen. So, we will be on the lookout for local, regional and global talents who can contribute to building automated ship recycling facilities and technology. We thank all our supporters and investors, who joined us in the last months. We are glad that our Stralsund activities are supported by Strela Shiprepair GmbH, who are providing Leviathan with their expertise, infrastructure, and their workforce as required.”