30 Years Ago

A LOOK BACK AT NOVEMBER 1992

IF WE REMEMBER anything about 1992 – other than the Barcelona Olympics, perhaps – it would be the Rio Earth Summit, where there had been an “almighty wrangle”, as HCB’s editor Mike Corkhill termed it, about how to deal with global warming. Would the imminent arrival of an avowed environmentalist as US vice-president enhance the chances of success? In the event, it made little difference and the earth’s atmosphere is still filling up with greenhouse gases thirty years later.

But the Rio Earth Summit was the beginning of what we are seeing today: increasing environmental legislation and growing restrictions on those chemicals deemed harmful to humans and the environment at large. We are being called on to use alternative fuels, reduce energy consumption and minimise waste, although over the course of the last three decades the time spent working on those solutions to climate change has been vastly outweighed by the continuation of the wrangling.

HCB’s November 1992 issue featured its usual lengthy reviews of recent regulatory meetings, starting with the UN Sub-committee of Experts’ sixth session, where the headline takeaway was that solids of Packing Group I would henceforth be allowed to be carried in IBCs. A large part of the report on that meeting was taken up with issues that had emanated from Rio de Janeiro, including a comprehensive programme of action for the environmentally sound management of chemicals; this led to the creation of the Globally Harmonised System (GHS) and a new UN Sub-committee, parallel to the transport body, to develop and look after it, although its first edition was not adopted until December 2002.

Returning to the topic of IBCs, an article by Vince Vitollo suggested that the US DOT’s HM-181 rulemaking, which had recently been published as a notice of proposed rulemaking, would on the one hand simplify matters for shippers by opening up the possibility of using different packagings, including all types of IBC. On the other hand, however, this would cause disharmony with some international provisions, particularly those in the IMDG Code. Moreover, the proposed requalification testing could lead to costly packagings being tested to destruction every year. There were, Vince said, more questions than answers so far, and he expected DOT would have a tough time to get an agreeable final rule together for publication in 1993.

An interesting illustration of how much times have changed in the past thirty years can be found in HCB’s annual review of the UK road tanker sector. As ever, this was accompanied by a listing of companies active in the sector, which ran to a page and included around 45 haulage firms. Today there are only a handful involved in the sector, and they have had to become a lot more professional in their operations if they are to find and keep business.

Some of their work was taken over by the growing tank container sector, which offered competition for cargo and some efficiency gains. However, running a tank container fleet was not all plain sailing. In November 1992 we reported that Taylor Minster Leasing was offering £500 for information that would help it find one of its tanks, last seen in Belfast but subsequently having vanished. Sadly, we do not know if it was ever recovered.