<<Shippers will have to pay more to ship their products around the world when the International Maritime Organization’s new container weight verification requirements take effect on July 1. Under an amendment to the IMO’s Safety of Life at Sea convention approved in 2014, the shipper on the bill of lading has two options to certify the verified gross mass of their containers, but both will incur additional expense.
Someone in a shipper’s global supply chain will have to provide to an ocean carrier a verified gross mass for every container in advance of sailing or it won’t get loaded. Whether a shipper chooses to have a container and its contents weighed as a single unit under Method 1 or weighs every item and packaging in the container and adds it to the tare weight of the box stenciled on the door, under Method 2, there will be additional cost, although Method 2 will probably cost less than under Method 1.
With implementation less than three months away, shippers are scrambling to figure out how to comply with the new requirements and looking to their freight forwarders for solutions. Many U.S. exporters will have to weigh every container and its contents as a unit under Method 1 to obtain the VGM for their containers because the weight of such primary U.S. containerized exports as grain, wastepaper and scrap metal vary from one container to another. U.S. retail importers, however, can mostly use Method 2 because their products come in definable SKUs that don’t vary in weight from shipment to shipment.
“You’ll see shippers using a combination of both methods, but the challenge is that shippers don’t often have the scales to do either one,” said Keith Andrey, vice president of global ocean freight transportation services at UPS. “This is where there is an opportunity for an intermediary to assist.”
UPS won’t weigh full containers but will be able to weigh individual units before they’re packed into containers at facilities where it has scales. “It would be full containerloads or less-than-containerloads or anything we would load for our customers,” Andrey said. UPS would add the container weight to the weight of the contents to get the VGM, “but we would need to have confirmation that this method is acceptable to all the countries that are enforcing the policies.”
UPS is talking to all the countries it serves to find out how they plan to enforce the regulations and how they plan to hold shippers accountable.>>