Chattogram
Chattogram's ship-breaking yards dismantle half the world's retired vessels—autophagy made industrial on tidal mudflats that also handle 90% of Bangladesh's trade.
Sitakunda ship-breaking yard stretches for 20 kilometres along the coast north of Chattogram, where workers armed with blowtorches dismantle supertankers, container ships, and oil rigs by hand on tidal mudflats. The yard processes roughly half the world's end-of-life vessels, recycling millions of tonnes of steel annually. This is autophagy made industrial—the global shipping organism consuming its own retired components on Bangladeshi beaches, extracting steel, copper, and fittings that re-enter the economy as construction rebar and household goods.
Chattogram (renamed from Chittagong in 2018) handles over 90% of Bangladesh's international trade through its port on the Karnaphuli River. The city's metro population of roughly five million makes it Bangladesh's second city after Dhaka, but its port function makes it the nation's metabolic gateway—the organ through which the garment industry's $40+ billion in annual exports flows outward and raw materials flow inward.
The city's geography is unusual for Bangladesh: hills rise directly behind the port, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts to the southeast contain indigenous Chakma, Marma, and Tripura communities whose presence predates Bengali settlement by centuries—a gene flow boundary where Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan cultures meet. This ethnic complexity has generated periodic conflict, including a low-grade insurgency resolved by the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord.
Chattogram's economic metabolism runs on three inputs: port logistics, garment manufacturing, and ship-breaking. The Karnaphuli Export Processing Zone and Korean EPZ host factories producing for global brands. The port expansion at Matarbari, funded by Japanese development assistance, represents niche construction aimed at handling larger vessels and competing with Colombo and Singapore for transshipment traffic. The organism's constraint is the Karnaphuli River itself—silting and depth limitations restrict the port to vessels under a certain draft, forcing Bangladesh to invest in deep-water alternatives or accept permanent throughput limits.