Batteries to Canada

A leading recycling organisation provided a collection and recycling service for a wide variety of waste batteries, many of which are Dangerous Goods, were having serious problems with consigning a shipping container of waste Lithium batteries to Canada for recycling.

The batteries, many of them too heavy to lift by hand, were from military and industrial sites worldwide. They had been prepared for shipment to our client by another consultancy company, and had all arrived at our clients site via shipping containers.

The incumbent consultancy were making impossible demands on our client regarding the loading of the shipping container. An FTA consultant was called in to assist, along with a container loading expert from the shipping company.

As a DGSA, the consultant’s first task was to check the packaging, labelling and marking of the batteries. The total consignment consisted of approximately 50 pallets. After carefully assessing each pallet we set aside roughly 15 of them as being impossible to ship legally owing to non-compliant packaging being used. The rest were deemed to be just about acceptable and the loads were condensed on the pallets to allow much safer loading.

Many of the packages had to be relabelled owing to the other consultancy company using labels they had printed themselves. These displayed many errors and were also not of a suitable quality to meet the IMDG regulations. After approximately seven hours of hard work (in freezing cold weather!) the shipping container was fully loaded and ready for shipping.

This is a rather extreme example but it does illustrate the lengths we are prepared to go to in order to solve problems for our DGSA service customers.