Many small shippers entering the online retail fray may not be aware that air cargo-specific hazardous materials transportation regulations even exist, let alone apply to their products.
Just because you can purchase a product off a store shelf and take it home in your car doesn’t mean it’s safe to ship in a cardboard box by air transport, but that’s just what’s happening all too frequently in today’s online shopping world, air cargo experts warn.
The trend toward anything and everything in small quantities finding its way onto an aircraft is understandable with so many online retailers offering next-day and two-day shipping. The problem is that many of these shippers may not be aware of the potential dangers some of these products pose when shipped by air.
“To many folks that are not directly involved in the logistics industry, the term ‘hazardous material’ means nuclear weapons, high grade explosives, or anything identified as an acid, and, of course, in most cases this is true,” said Hank Baird, general manager of ATP Training, a subsidiary of AllTransPack based in Sterling, Va, “But what the general public does not fully grasp is the fact that hazardous materials include many household items such as smoke alarms, cell phones, aerosols, etc.”
“We’re seeing this more often as companies out there want to compete directly with Amazon in the quick-delivery game,” said Mike Pagel, senior consultant for Chicago-based Labelmaster Services, who recently did a stint with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
“When you speed up the process, the likelihood of these types of shipments falling through the cracks is heightened,” he added. “Many e-commerce shippers may not realize that the hazardous rules apply when shipping by air a can of hairspray, which, for example, is a Class 2 flammable gas.”
Title 49 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (49 CFR) largely governs the nation’s transportation regulations, including hazardous materials. International air cargo standards are developed by the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization and further communicated to the industry by the International Air Transport Association.
Many small shippers entering the online retail fray may not be aware that air cargo-specific hazardous materials transportation regulations even exist, let alone apply to their products.
“I would think that the vast majority of undeclared hazardous materials that are offered into the air cargo system as undeclared are the result of the shipper simply not knowing any better,” said Robert Macher, president of AllTransPack.
However, the company doesn’t doubt that some shippers intentionally tender undeclared hazardous materials shipments to airlines.
“Maybe it’s an urgent shipment that needs to go now and there’s not enough time to prepare in accordance with the regulations, so they throw it into a plain brown box and offer it for overnight delivery as general cargo,” Baird said. “Or perhaps they are trying to avoid the associated hazardous materials fees that are applied by the air carrier in addition to the regular shipping fees.”
“There are shippers out there that view the regulations as too complicated and chose to ignore them,” Pagel said. “Smaller companies don’t usually have legal and compliance people on staff and are not aware that these rules exist. If I wasn’t exposed to the regulations myself, I wouldn’t think that shipping a cell phone is a hazard.”
Pagel also pointed to the free shipping offers that come with e-commerce product orders as another instigator of careless air cargo shipping of hazardous materials. “The mindset of ‘how quickly can we get it to your door’ has become a huge arms race among these companies,” he said.
Hiding In Plain Sight. DOT’s Federal Aviation Administration is struggling to gets its arms around the problem of parcel-sized, undeclared hazardous materials within the air cargo stream.
“We suspect there has been an increase in the number of undeclared hazmat packages entering the air cargo system, but their very ‘undeclared’ nature makes it impossible for us to track how many are out there,” said Jonathan Carter, deputy director of the FAA’s Office of Hazardous Materials and Safety.
“The challenge with e-commerce is that there are so many small independent shippers that are under the umbrella of the big e-retail sites. It’s impossible to know who they all are and where they are, so traditional inspection methods won’t work,” he said.
“To the credit of the airlines, Postal Service, and integrators, they have all worked to get the public’s attention by posting signs, asking questions at the ticket counters, postal counters, and the integrators absolutely provide training that helps prevent hazmat from entering into the transportation cycle,” Macher said. “But there is no real way to determine if what is packaged by the general public contains hazardous materials unless it is declared up front or you open the package.”
The FAA is aware that there are many e-commerce sites today selling household products such as aerosols, perfumes, drain cleaners, paints and other goods in pressurized and liquid forms that consumers have long been used to buying in a local store.
“In the traditional market logistics, these travel by surface mode from the factory to the distribution center to the retail store,” Carter said. “For surface transportation, a lot of ‘consumer commodities’ are excepted from many of the hazmat transport regulations such as DOT hazard labels and hazmat shipping papers. So warehouse and retail employees may not realize these products are hazardous materials when they are shipped by air.”
The FAA official said it also doesn’t help that legacy Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) “exacerbate this problem because the transport section of the MSDS may say ‘Not Regulated’ when it really means it qualifies for exceptions when shipped by highway—because that’s the way the manufacturer ships it.”
Air carriers that discover undeclared hazardous materials shipments are obligated by law to report those incidents to the FAA and PHMSA for follow-up enforcement action.
“Many of our hazmat enforcement cases involve an undeclared shipment that an air carrier discovered because the package was leaking,” Carter said.
That’s because a lot of liquid product packaging is not designed to withstand the air pressure changes encountered during air transport. E-commerce packages are also handled more than those shipments which are part of a palletized load and move as units between distribution and retail centers, and are therefore more susceptible to drops and damages, Carter said.
Burning Batteries. Perhaps no other product has reminded the air cargo industry of its vulnerability to potentially deadly disasters from undeclared hazardous materials more than lithium metal and ion batteries. One of the more recent examples involving these batteries has been with the Samsung Galaxy Note7 smartphone devices, which are prone to overheating and even catching fire.
In mid-October, DOT joined other regulatory authorities worldwide in banning these phones from air travel, as well as air cargo.
But the safety concerns related to these batteries in air transport date back to the mid-1990s, when hand-held electronic devices, such as mobile phones and laptop computers, first began proliferating on the global market.
In 1999, a shipment of pallets holding about 120,000 lithium batteries caught fire after being off-loaded from a flight originating in Japan. The fire was quelled by cargo-handling employees with fire extinguishers, but continued to burn.
The cargo manifest of a UPS cargo plane that crashed in Dubai in 2010 listed several large, undeclared lithium ion batteries which originated in China.
This was followed by the July 2011 in-flight fire and crash of an Asiana Airlines plane in international waters off South Korea. The U.S. government’s National Safety Transportation Board participated in the investigation at the request of the South Korean government. South Korean investigators determined that the cause of the accident was a fire that developed around two pallets containing dangerous goods packages, including hybrid-electric vehicle lithium ion batteries and flammable liquids. They could not find a definitive cause for the fire, but said the proximity of the flammable materials and the lithium ion batteries in the plane’s hold was a contributing factor in the fire’s spread.
Experts say current cargo fire suppression systems on board aircraft are incapable of sufficiently controlling a high-heat lithium battery fire. ICAO, as well as aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus, have advised airlines about the dangers associated with carrying these batteries as cargo.
On Jan. 1, 2015, ICAO banned lithium metal batteries from passenger planes, followed by a similar order by the organization for lithium ion batteries on April 1. PHMSA and FAA banned lithium metal batteries from passenger planes on Dec. 29, 2004. The agencies have not yet issued a similar ban for lithium-ion batteries, but on Sept. 7 proposed a rule change to do so. These batteries may still be shipped on cargo planes as long as they do not contain a charge of more than 30 percent.
The battery and airline industries believe that if these rules are adhered to, then lithium batteries can be safely shipped by air transport. However, they warn of ongoing “willful disregard of the regulations by rogue manufacturers and shippers,” namely from China.
The Washington, D.C.-based PRBA-Rechargeable Battery Association has called for tougher enforcement, new efforts to identify companies repeatedly violating the law, and stiff fines to force China’s lithium ion battery manufacturers and shippers to comply with international transport regulations.
“The flagrant abuse of the stringent ICAO dangerous goods regulations that apply to the manufacturing, testing, labeling, packaging and shipping of lithium batteries must be stopped,” PRBA Executive Director George Kerchner said in a statement this summer. “For too long, the criminal behavior of only a handful of unscrupulous lithium battery manufacturers and shippers has unfairly threatened the outstanding safety record of legitimate battery manufacturers while posing a clear and present danger that governments can best address through cooperative enforcement initiatives.”
A bigger concern for airlines and express carriers in the near term may be the small mom-and-pop and one-off shippers who attempt to ship lithium batteries as undeclared hazardous materials shipments.
E-commerce Enforcement. During the past several years, the FAA has announced an increasing number of enforcement actions related to undeclared, e-commerce hazardous materials shipments, publicizing in press releases those incidents involving penalties of more than $50,000.
“We don’t keep statistics on which incidents or enforcement cases are specific to e-commerce because that is not always readily apparent to us,” FAA’s Carter admitted. “Many of the traditional industrial distributors now have an e-commerce operation, as well.”
The FAA, however, has pointed out that Seattle-based online retail giant Amazon has a history of violating federal hazardous materials transport regulations.
On June 13, the agency proposed a $350,000 civil penalty against Amazon related to an Oct. 15, 2014 hazardous materials shipment involving an unmarked cardboard box containing a one-gallon can of corrosive drain cleaner which was to be flown by UPS from Louisville, Ky., to Boulder Colo.
“While being transported, some of the Liquid Fire leaked through the fiberboard box. Nine UPS employees who came into contact with the box reported feeling a burning sensation and were treated with a chemical wash,” the FAA said.
This is not the first leaking or damaged hazardous materials shipment from Amazon, without proper markings or documentation, to be discovered by air cargo-handling personnel. From February 2013 to September 2015 alone, the online retailer was found to have violated hazmat regulations 24 times, according to the FAA.
More FAA penalties have since been assessed against Amazon. On June 22, the retailer was handed a combined penalty of $130,000 for two hazardous materials transport violations. The FAA alleged that on May 24, 2014, Amazon offered FedEx two cardboard boxes containing corrosive rust stain preventer for air transport from Plainfield, Ill. to Davenport, Fla. Workers at FedEx’s sorting facility in Lake Wales, Fla., discovered one of the containers had leaked through the unmarked cardboard box. Then on June 2, 2014, the FAA said Amazon offered UPS an improperly marked cardboard box containing a flammable gas for air transport from Whitestown, Ind., to Glendale, Calif. The package held a 19-ounce container of Simple Air EZ Green HVAC Cleaner. Workers in UPS’s Louisville, Ky., sort facility discovered the container.
In October, the FAA proposed another $78,000 civil penalty for air cargo hazardous materials violations against Amazon. This time the agency alleged on Aug. 7, 2015, Amazon offered FedEx an undeclared hazmat shipment containing two 14-ounce bottles of ethanol-based Clubman Jeris Hair Tonic, considered a flammable liquid, to be moved by air transport from Ruskin, Fla. to Algonquin, Ill. That package was found by workers in FedEx’s Cary, Ill., sort facility, who noticed it was leaking.
And Amazon’s improper handling of hazardous materials in transport has not been limited solely to the United States either. In September, an Amazon subsidiary in the United Kingdom was fined 65,000 British pounds (about $84,300) by the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority for “causing dangerous goods to be delivered for carriage in an aircraft” on four occasions between January 2014 and June 2015, in violation of the country’s Air Navigation (Dangerous Goods) Regulations. Those shipments included undocumented lithium ion batteries and flammable aerosols.
Commercial cargo-handling agents are becoming increasingly fed up with e-commerce shippers, such as Amazon, not abiding by the hazardous materials rules for air freight.
“[FAA] should hit them fast and hard, and make it memorable,” said Brandon Fried, executive director of the Airforwarders Association. “Being in the [logistics] business doesn’t mean you know the business.”
“We recognize we need to do a lot more proactive engagement with e-commerce shippers,” Carter said. “The FAA Office of Hazardous Materials Safety is standing up a new division aimed at external stakeholder engagement. This division will work closely with other government agencies, as well as industry groups.
“We want to make sure people know the rules, and make sure we have a good picture of the new players who may be introducing risk into the air cargo system,” he said.
Hazmat Training. Many hazardous materials specialists say they find a pervasive lack of knowledge and training when it comes to shipping potentially dangerous cargoes by air.
“I have encountered numerous shippers who were directed to our company because it was discovered by a forwarding agent or cargo handler that they were attempting to ship a particular hazardous material as undeclared, and their explanation to us as to why they did not think that their item was a hazardous material varies,” said Baird.
“Some people have posed the question, ‘if I bought this at Walmart how dangerous can it be?’ In other instances, if a person works with a particular hazardous material as part of their day-to-day job, even though they may have been trained about the dangers through their required OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) training, they do not realize that the item or material is a hazardous material when shipping it,” he explained.
According to a recent survey by Labelmaster of transportation professionals who handle dangerous goods, 62 percent said they are “not very confident that their supply chain partners are as good as they are in keeping compliance and meeting regulations,” and could pose a serious safety risk in the supply chain.
“These findings are alarming when you consider the number of divisions and locations within an organization that may ship hazmat, and the number of parties involved throughout the supply chain,” said Alan Schoen, president of Labelmaster. “As the regulations broaden, we see many businesses—particularly retailers—are finding that things they ship and handle every day are now included in the hazmat world.”
One major source of confusion is the mode-specific differences in the regulations, which may cause people to unknowingly offer hazardous material for air transport as undeclared.
“Air transport of hazardous materials is, in most cases, the most restrictive, while highway always allows the most exceptions,” Baird said. “The most common example of this is the fact that some flammable liquids are permitted to be shipped via highway only as non-hazardous, while they must be declared as hazardous materials when shipped via air.”
By law, anyone shipping hazardous materials must be aware of the hazmat transportation regulations (49 CFR, section 172-700, subpart H). “Eighty percent of all retailers would fall under this training requirement,” Macher said. “I cannot say whether they have such training or they don’t, but my guess is they don’t.”
AllTransPack and Labelmaster are among about 20 different U.S. firms that offer hazardous materials transport compliance training and related packaging supplies and services. Many are also members of the Council on Safe Transportation of Hazardous Articles, Dangerous Goods Trainers Association, and Dangerous Goods Advisory Council.
The two main players in offering and transporting hazardous materials in air transportation are the shipper and carrier.
“Each of these entities have two vastly different regulatory responsibilities that they are required to fulfill and they are each approached in very different manners by the authorities in an enforcement scenario,” Baird said.
“That being said, the required training for the air operator, which must be completed every two years, not only has to be a function specific to what they actually do on the job, it also has to include the same required training that the shipper has to go through,” he added. “The thought process behind this requirement in training is that, by being thoroughly trained in the shipper’s specific responsibilities and requirements in preparing the shipment for transport, it helps the air carrier personnel in finding and detecting undeclared or mis-declared hazardous materials when trying to verify compliance by the shipper.
“As far as everyone who is involved in transporting hazardous materials in air cargo—shippers, freight forwarders and air carriers—instilling the proper attitude in their hazardous materials employees who are responsible for processing these shipments is key, and that proper attitude begins at the top of the organizational food chain,” Baird said.
Chris Gillis is Editor of American Shipper. He can be reached by email at cgillis@shippers.com.
