The countries where ship-breaking now takes place sorely need that income and steel it generates, and can largely ignore nettlesome safety regulations.
It said several thousand people had died in accidents in ship-breaking yards over the past 20 years - not including deaths from long-term contamination.
Iron-eating microbes are steadily breaking down the actual sunken ship, but the pieces already culled from the wreck's 13-mile debris field are "spectacular, " said John Joslyn, the owner of a pair of Titanic theme museums in Missouri and Tennessee who helped to fund the first salvaging expedition in 1987.