Beware fiddling your container load declarations

 Taiwanese container shipping line, Wan Hai Lines, has announced large fines and other costs for shippers whose container load declarations are inaccurate, as part of a crackdown on maritime crime that has bedevilled the industry for decades. For hazardous cargo the fine will be $30,000 per container and $20,000 for non hazardous. 

Container load discrepancies are widespread, despite an IMO compromise in 2013 on making weighing containers mandatory, a watering down that infuriated various governments and interested marine bodies . The beaching of the MSC Napoli container ship off the Devon coast in 2007 showed the breathtaking scale of fraud involved that also imperils ships, seamen road safety and the environment. Britain's Marine Accident Investigation Branch found that 20% of all deck containers on board the ill-fated ship were three tonnes heavier than their declared weights and in one case was 20 tonnes. 

Such discrepancies may have been partly due to many packers and shippers not having the facilities to weigh containers at their premises but the incentive to fiddle is huge. By deliberately under declaring container load weights shippers can minimise import taxes calculated on cargo weight, but it also allows overloaded containers to keep declared weights within limits imposed by road and rail transportation. Container shipping lines are also swindled. Other container lines will doubtless follow suit so shippers and packers should treat this as a warning shot across the bows.  

The ill-fated container ship, Napoli, beached on a Devon coast after a storm that exposed arguably shipping's greatest fraud.

Innovation on Sany's reach stackers yield one-year payback

 It is rare to find innovation giving costs and environmental advantages that repay the initial investment within one year yet that is what Sany has done with its energy recovery system (ERS) on its H9 20ft and 40ft container handling reach stackers.

Sany uses ERS that has been around for 20 years but only recently has it used the technology on its reach stackers, ostensibly the first and only to do so. Unlike many reach stackers it uses four cylinders for lifting and lowering, two of which are placed behind the driver's cab. These rear cylinders use the downward gravitational forces to charge nitrogen accumulators which in turn provide extra power over and above the available engine power for the next lift. The result is that theH9 stackers give more than 50% fuel savings over an identical machine without the ERS. Competitors use another system called flow drive transmissions with smaller engines but achievable fuel savings are only 25%.

How, though, do the investment figures stack up to justify the extra £25,000 to £30,000 for fitting the ERS? First consider the impact of the UK's abolition of red diesel for off road vehicles on April 1st this year. The lower duty on red diesel was only 11.14p per litre compared with the full duty rate of 57.9p for regular diesel, a huge difference. Now let's assume that a £380,000 yard reach stacker consumes 20 litres of diesel per hour. The ERS technology consumes only 9 litres of fuel per hour. Assuming a saving of 11 litres at £1.20 per litre and 2,000 hours work a year that equates to a saving of £26,000 every year, hence the one-year payback. 

Not to be left out of the advantages is the environmental one that means far less exposure to diesel fumes and a cleaner, greener atmosphere. David Cooper, MD of Cooper Specialised Handling, the sole UK importer of Sany lift trucks, claims the H9 technology is the most radical change in reach stackers in the last 20 years. The technology certainly bears consideration.

A Sany H9 container handling reach stacker with the fitted ERS system for cutting fuel costs by over 50%

 

 

In praise of articulated forklifts

When first launched in Britain in the 1980s* the articulated forklift was derided by the competition as a Heath Robinson contraption that would go nowhere. Today it has found universal acceptance through the dramatic transformation of warehouse economics but is there still market reticence and ignorance of such trucks' full potential?

One hears a great deal about how space efficient the artics are over the conventional counterbalanced and reach trucks and understandably so because saved space can have knock-on benefits of reduced rates, rents, heating, transport costs, etc but is there much more to it than that? Yes, a great deal more. 

Take, for example, the artics' flexibility which leads to big productive gains, especially when they are fitted with RDTs. Such add-ons allow them to unload lorries in yards, where reach trucks are not really suitable, to deliver pallets directly into racking, and directed by the WMS then go straight to extract a pallet load for delivery to a waiting lorry. This can sharply reduce forklift fleet sizes and maintenance costs. 

I mentioned transport cost reductions as an advantage. This can be considerable when artics eliminate satellite warehouses through their space savings and the transport costs of running between them and a main warehouse which could be part of a production facility. 

So next time when strapped for storage space why not consider the artics as the answer to your prayers? UK suppliers of the artics are Translift Bendi, Flexi Narrow Aisle, Combilift and Mima (Wilmat Handling)

*The functionally limited Towmotor of the 1960s excluded.  

An articulated forklift shows the incredible 

space savings over a cb truck (up to 50%) and 

up to 30% over a reach truck