US exporters' specious argument for delaying container weight regulations
For over 20 years, shippers have been legally obliged to declare the correct weight of ...
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Dutch shipper body EVO has warned of a flaw in the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) forthcoming regulation on container weight with shippers obliged to provide a verified gross measurement of the weight of export containers prior to loading on ships.
EVO policy consultant on maritime affairs and fiscal lawyer Lodewijk Wisse told The Loadstar that part of the legislation, which becomes law on 1 July 2016, allows individual countries to set their own weight tolerance percentages for weighing equipment. This, he ...
Comment on this article
Ron Signorino
September 25, 2015 at 2:46 pmEVO’s claim is somewhat disingenuous, inasmuch as arriving at all legal weights and measures are the proper province of the statutorily-mandated national authority within each sovereign nation.
Thus, in example only, if the United Kingdom wanted to stipulate a less accurate tolerance for the weighing of a pound of potatoes at market than France, it would be free to do so. The real questions are:
1). Why would they? and
2). Wouldn’t market forces culture the correction of such unruly behavior?
Gary French
September 27, 2015 at 12:34 amEVO have not interpreted the UK container weighing rules correctly. UK MGN-534 requires that containers are weighed with Weights and Measures certified equipment, which implies OIML standards and a minimum accuracy level of +/- 0.5%. The UK accuracy standard for container weighing equipment will therefore be consistent with the Danes’. It would be the Dutch who would be well out of line with the rest of the world if a +/-5% accuracy standard for weighing equipment was adopted. This accuracy level would render the new weighing regime pointless. Imagine, the Emma Maersk with up to 15,000 tonne of uncertainty in its cargo!
For those interested in the finer points, EVO are conflating a number of things,
(A) the accuracy and certification standard applying to weighing equipment in the UK MGN (+/- 0.5%),
(B) the enforcement threshold specified in the UK MGN (up to 5%, but to be enforced on a case by case basis), and
(C) EVO’s testing of the tare weight of empty containers, where they say there was a discrepancy of up to 5%.
Mike Farry
October 23, 2015 at 9:44 pmA 5% variation on the weight of an empty 20 ft container, which EVO reports, is about 100 kg. That uncertainty is neglible in relation to the gross weight of a laden container. A 5% tolerance on the gross weight is something else completely. That’s 1500 kg uncertainty on a 30 tonne container; exactly what the weight verification rules are aimed at reducing.