Ship graveyard

Such a practice is now less common due to waste regulations and so some dry docks where ships are broken (to recycle their metal and remove dangerous materials like asbestos) are also known as ship graveyards.

By analogy, the phrase can also refer to an area with many shipwrecks which have not been removed by human agency, instead being left to disintegrate naturally.

These can form in places where navigation is difficult or dangerous (such as the Seven Stones, off Cornwall, or Blackpool, on the Irish Sea); or where many ships have been deliberately scuttled together (as with the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow); or where many ships have been sunk in battle (such as Ironbottom Sound, in the Pacific).

Most of them are directly sold to the ship recycling companies in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other developing countries, also known as the (semi-)periphery countries from Immanuel Wallerstein's World System Theory.

[3] It is estimated that ship breaking yards provide more than 100,000 jobs to people worldwide and that they yield millions of tons of steel every year with a minimal consumption of electricity.