The European Shippers\u2019 Council has considered with great interest the recent debate on misdeclaration of weights in container transport.<\/p>\n
From a shippers’ perspective the idea of creating extra legislation to make verification of weights obligatory will not help increase the safety in the supply chain substantially. It is the wrong cure for an ill defined disease and a more comprehensive approach is needed.<\/p>\n
In current proposals that are being discussed the aim is to add an extra mandatory container weighing requirement for shippers to existing SOLAS regulations. These proposals are the result of concerns existing in the maritime industry and with governments, about a series of incidents in container transport. These include the roll-over of trucks in Japan, the capsizing of the MSC Napoli <\/i>in the English Channel, collapsing stacks and the frequent loss of containers at open seas.<\/p>\n
Under justified pressure from labour unions, a number of parties recently sought action on a global scale to make sure accidents like these are prevented as much as possible. The shipowners took the initiative in this debate and pointed out that, according to them, the biggest problem for safe container transport is the misdeclaration of weights by shippers.<\/p>\n
They say that if we want to secure the supply chain, governments should ensure that the weight shippers declare on their documents corresponds with the exact weight of the goods in the container. At first glance this is a fair demand.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Heavy-weight <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/b> <\/p>\n
In the UK, road checks revealed a significant amount of checked container transports that were heavier than declared. The UK government also inquired into the causes of the capsizing of the MSC Napoli <\/i>and found that 20% of the containers on that ship were carrying more goods than actually mentioned on the transportation documents.<\/p>\n
Fundamentally, shipowners believe that there was something structurally wrong within the dataflow from the shipper to the carrier.<\/p>\n
But disappointingly, by only pointing at these findings, the shipowners have created the impression that the misdeclaration of weight by shippers was the cause of all the aforementioned accidents. This is where we as the European Shippers’ Council believe that the discussion took a wrong turn.<\/p>\n
We believe that only a small proportion of the misdeclared containers actually create a real threat to workers\u2019 safety. To justify this belief we must first clarify the causes that led to the aforementioned accidents and examine the perceived safety hazards in container transport.<\/p>\n
When we read the analysis of, for instance, the MAIB report on structural failure of MSC Napoli, <\/i>we came across some important additional findings that have been undeservedly neglected in the current debate. For instance, it is stated in the report that it is generally agreed within the container industry that up to 10% of containers loaded on to a vessel might not be allocated to the correct stack. So if all shippers declare their weights 100% correctly, 10% of these boxes will still end up in a different place on the ship to the space allocated to them by the stowage plan. If perfect knowledge of the weight of containers is that essential for the safety of the ship, we wonder why the industry is willing to live with this 10% margin of incorrectly stowed container.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Stressed out<\/b> <\/p>\n
Another finding in the MAIB report on the capsizing of the MSC Napoli <\/i>is that various reliable data indicates that the practice of arriving and departing from berths with ship stresses in excess of permissible seagoing levels is commonplace within the containership industry. Further, it is accepted that some vessels remain above the maximum seagoing limit when in open water, particular when the distance between terminals is short.<\/p>\n
The MSC Napoli <\/i>report also stated that earlier repairs on the ship\u2019s hull, although obligatory, were not reported. Therefore symptoms of the poor state of the ship\u2019s girders and buckling of the plates did not lead to further investigations into possible design problems.<\/p>\n
The International Labour Organization rightly concluded in the MSC Napoli\u2019s <\/i>case that assuming the cargo was well secured, it would have presented no greater danger to the ship than if the containers were properly declared.<\/p>\n
Conclusions of other accidents also indicate that other factors have a much greater impact on the safety of workers in the supply chain than declared container weights. In trucking incidents, the driver\u2019s behavior, misplaced centres of gravity and road angles are the biggest problems. And reports on collapsing stacks or the loss of containers at sea state that poor lashing and bad weather are main causes of accidents.<\/p>\n
<\/b>It remains true, though, that the facts also indicate that shippers’ information and transport operators’ data often do not match. After reading accident reports, we do agree that while these misdeclarations are not the root cause for the incidents, action should nevertheless be taken to improve the quality of the data, even if only for mainly commercial reasons.<\/p>\n
Shipowners use the shipper\u2019s booking data to create their stowing plans, with real time data processed afterwards. Shipping instructions often come in too late and it is true that shippers sometimes change their stuffing plans for the containers at the last minute to minimise unnecessary additional costs.<\/p>\n
We believe that the bulk of misdeclared weights comes from this type of late entry shipping instructions. This should be tackled through an improvement of the contract arrangements and the way shippers and carriers live up to those contract provisions. If the timely delivery of data is organised in a proper way, we believe the percentage of \u2018misdeclared weights\u2019 will be drastically minimised.<\/p>\n
But there is more shippers need to do. There are groups of shippers that intentionally stuff containers over their maximum allowed gross weight and there are shippers that stuff their goods incorrectly. To us it is clear that when shippers intentionally break the rules on maximum container weights they can and should be fined.<\/p>\n
Specific checks by authorities following existing SOLAS regulation already force shippers to declare weights correctly, but this should be better organised to send a firm message to all shippers that intentionally defy the rules. But because this is only a very small portion of the global shippers’ community, the ESC calls on all parties to join forces in identifying this group, to ensure that they are prevented from violating container weight rules in the future.<\/p>\n
There is already legislation in place that gives authorities and shipowners the necessary powers to legally tackle all non-complying parties.<\/p>\n
We also admit that there is a need to improve the quality of container stuffing by shippers. This is nothing to do with weight, but instead it concerns the way shipper\u2019s employees are acquainted with the basics of container stuffing. Securing goods correctly so that imbalances are prevented and goods do not shift once on the road is essential.<\/p>\n
We agree with those who think a lot of work still needs to be done in this field. At ESC, we believe that shippers can really contribute to safety in the supply chain if they improve the quality of their stuffing and that is why we at ESC proactivelty contributes to UNECE debates on the international safety guidelines for container transport.<\/p>\n
In summary, as a shipper\u2019s representative, ESC believes that we have to focus on improving the safety of the container transport supply chain as a whole. We do not believe that amending IMO\u2019s SOLAS with extra regulation on mandatory weighing – be it at the shipper\u2019s production site or at the terminal – is the right way to achieve this.<\/p>\n
If we are really serious about improving the safety conditions for workers, lashing companies will have to start improving their procedures. Shipowners have to sit down with shippers to get procedures in place to collect data properly and they will have to improve the execution of their maintenance procedures. Terminal operators will have to improve stowing plans and reject containers that could end up in a different stack to the one planned. Shippers will have to improve the quality of their stuffing. And finally the whole maritime cluster will have pinpoint and fine companies that stuff containers over their maximum allowed gross mass. We are ready to take up our responsibility and hope others will take theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ESCs Marco Wiesehahn says that container weighing is just one of many factors affecting port safety<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1887,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-container-cargo-handling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1888,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886\/revisions\/1888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1886"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}