Container payload scams cost billions and risk lives
Guest Columnist Bill Redmond talks of overloaded containers that can cause significant losses....

Deliberate under declaring of shipping container weights costs shipping lines and governments billions of pounds in lost revenue every year and places ships and their crews at risk. Remarkably, container shipping is the only sector of the industry in which the weight of the cargo is not known and there is no requirement for containers to be weighed at a European port before loading a ship. This issue of container payload weights is left to packers and consignors whose word is taken entirely on trust but that trust has been grossly abused for years, leading, in some cases, to disastrous consequences. The motive, as in passenger shipping, is to save money, regardless of the consequences for safety.*

Now, following two container shipping accident reports conducted by the Marine Accident Investigation Board (MAIB), the industry is belatedly considering mandatory weighing of all containers at embarkation ports. This should reduce the rising incidence of on-deck container stack collapses because port operators would be able to distribute containers on board correctly to maximise stability. It would also reduce the stresses on a ship’s hull.

Kalmar, a leading supplier of port handling equipment, believes the best place for weighing to be done is where lorries or trains have their containers transferred to a stacking area by reach stackers, RTGs and straddle carriers. Weighbridges at port entry would only create bottlenecks and ship-to-shore cranes should be ruled out as this would be too late in the process.

Nearly all of Kalmar’s straddle carriers and RTGs delivered in the last five years can be retrofitted with optional modules. It would then only remain to include the weighing information in the data exchange between the machine and the terminal operating software and for the TOS to compare the declared weight with the actual weight that has been recorded by the port handling equipment. No manual input is required.

However, weighing outside of ports would also be necessary because it makes sense to weigh the containers at shippers’ or packers’ pick up points. To save them the cost of installing all the weighing facilities, companies like Essex-based Containerlift could fit weighers to their container handling lorries. This would have the added advantage of hauliers avoiding fines arising from roadside spot checks on overweight lorries. It would also save consignors or packers from the extra expense of rectifying their container overloading at ports and possibly delaying shipment. The most sensible approach, however, would be for consignors and packers to fit load cells to their own container stuffing forklifts or pallet trucks, which typically cost between £2,500 to £3,000.

The financial losses involved through dishonest container weight declarations are staggering. In its investigation into the MSC Napoli, beached on a Devon coast last year, MAIB found that no less than 20% of all the on-deck containers were over 3 tonnes heavier than their declared weights and in one case the difference was 20 tonnes!

Last year there were 141 million TEUs transported by sea, or 1,272 million tonnes. Such discrepancy, says the MAIB Napoli report, “is widespread within the container ship industry and is due to many packers and shippers not having the facilities to weigh containers on their premises. It is also due to shippers deliberately under declaring containers’ weights in order to minimise import taxes calculated on cargo weight, allow the overloading of containers, and to keep declared weights within limits imposed by road or rail transportations.” They could also have added that the container shipping lines, who charge by the box, lose vast sums every year because if consignors and packers were honest they would need to use more containers.

Of equal or greater concern is the safety of seaman and the environment and on this MAIB was scathing about the marine industry’s hypocrisy . “While key industry players will attest that safety is of paramount concern, evidence obtained during this and other MAIB investigations into container ship accidents suggests that in reality the safety of ships, crews and the environment is being compromised by the overriding desire to maintain schedules while optimising port turnaround times,” it said.

It is to be hoped that the International Chamber of Shipping and the World Shipping Council will not be tardy in their deliberations to enforce container weighing to improve safety to levels seamen expect and deserve. The lives of seamen, so vital in feeding nations and oiling the cogs of the global economy, should not be so contemptuously sacrificed on the altar of meanly-earned profits.
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*See Shippingtimes.co.uk (November 2007 news: “A Titanic in the making?”)