The SOLAS Container Weight Verification Requirement
January 2015
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has amended the Safety of Life at Sea Convention (SOLAS) to require, as a condition for loading a packed container onto a ship for export, that the container has a verified weight. The shipper is responsible for the verification of the packed container’s weight. This requirement will become legally effective on July 1, 2016. After that date, it would be a violation of SOLAS to load a packed container onto a vessel if the vessel operator and marine terminal operator do not have a verified container weight.
The SOLAS amendments provide that there are two methods shippers may use to determine the container weight once the container packing process has taken place. This requirement will apply globally. Shippers, freight forwarders, vessel operators, and terminal operators will all need to establish policies and procedures to ensure the implementation of this regulatory change.
Because there have been questions about what the specific nature of the SOLAS changes are, the World Shipping Council provides the following basic synopsis of the SOLAS requirement.
Basic Principles Under the SOLAS Requirement
1. Before a packed container can be loaded onto a ship, its weight must be determined through weighing.1 It is a violation of SOLAS to load a packed container aboard a vessel
1 In the absence of a shipper providing a verified gross mass of a packed container, that container “shall not be loaded on to the ship”. SOLAS Chapter VI, Regulation 2, paragraph 6. The IMO Guidelines, Section 6, also state: “A container packed with packages and cargo items should not be loaded onto a ship to which the SOLAS regulations apply unless the master or his representative and the terminal representative have obtained, in advance of vessel loading, the verified actual gross mass of the container.”
Packed containers for which a verified weight was provided prior to loading in a preceding load port may be loaded in transshipment ports without having to have their weights re-verified if the port terminal in the transshipment port has been advised of this by the operator of the arriving vessel.
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to which SOLAS applies without a proper weight verification. There is no exception to this requirement.
2. Under the SOLAS amendments, there are two permissible methods for weighing: Method 1, which requires weighing the container after it has been packed, or Method 2,2 which requires weighing all the cargo and contents of the container and adding those weights to the container’s tare weight as indicated on the door end of the container.
3. Estimating weight is not permitted. The shipper (or by arrangement of the shipper, a third party) has a responsibility to weigh the packed container or to weigh its contents. Under either Method, the weighing equipment used must meet national certification and calibration requirements. Further, the party packing the container cannot use the weight somebody else has provided, except in one specific set of defined circumstances.3
4. A carrier may rely on a shipper’s signed weight verification to be accurate. The carrier does not need to be a “verifier” of the shipper’s weight verification. Nor do the SOLAS amendments require a carrier to verify that a shipper providing a verified weight according to Method 2 has used a method which has been certified and approved by the competent authority of the jurisdiction in which the packing and sealing of the container was completed. However, it is important to note that, for the shipper’s weight verification to be compliant with the SOLAS requirement, it must be “signed”, meaning a specific person representing the shipper is named and identified as having verified the accuracy of the weight calculation on behalf of the shipper.4
2 The IMO Guidelines state that Method 2 “would be inappropriate and impractical” for “certain types of cargo items (e.g., scrap metal, unbagged grain and other cargo in bulk)” that “do not easily lend themselves to individual weighing of the items to be packed in the container.” IMO Guidelines, paragraph 7.2.2.
3 The one exception is as follows: “Individual, original sealed packages that have the accurate mass of the packages and cargo items (including any other material such as packing material and refrigerants inside the packages) clearly and permanently marked on their surfaces, do not need to be weighed again when they are packed into the container.” IMO Guidelines, paragraph 7.2.1. This does not permit estimating the cargo weight, but permits using accurate weights that have been clearly and permanently marked on individual, original sealed packages (e.g., flat screen TVs that have their weight (e.g. X kg.) marked by the manufacturer on the box containing the TV).
There is no exception for co-loaded containers. The IMO Guidelines are clear that the shipper named on the ocean carrier bill of lading is the party responsible for provid