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KEEP IT IN THE TANK TANK CONTAINERS • SHIPPING LIQUIDS IN PLASTICS BAGS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA ON SAFETY GROUNDS NOR, AS ITCO HIGHLIGHTS, DOES IT FIT WITH SHIPPERS’ SUSTAINABILITY GOALS THE ROLE OF the International Tank Container Organisation (ITCO) is to promote the use of tank containers for the movement of bulk liquid products. To do so, it highlights their efficiency and safety features but, of late, has also been looking at environmental and sustainability factors as it strives to help its members migrate cargoes from competing transport formats. In particular, ITCO is seeking to promote the sustainability advantages of tank containers over flexitanks or flexibags, which carry around one million shipments of nonhazardous liquids each year, a significant proportion of which represent output from the chemical industry. During a webinar held on 17 September – partly as a replacement for ITCO’s planned
HCB MONTHLY | OCTOBER 2020
members’ meeting, which had to be cancelled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – representatives of the ITCO Sustainability Work Group, established in October 2019, brought members up to speed on developments, not least the launch of a video, available both in English and Mandarin, on the use of flexibags and their contribution to plastics waste. GROWING AWARENESS William Leigh-Pemberton, chair of ITCO’s Operators Division, highlighted the fact that what he called the “Blue Planet effect”, after the BBC documentary showing the extent of plastics pollution in the world’s oceans, had raised awareness of the issue and the significant damage being done to the global
environment by single-use plastics. But, he said, the best way to reduce plastics waste is not to use it in the first place – after all, each piece of single-use plastics, whether it is a shopping bag or a flexitank, has to be manufactured for each and every load. And a flexitank is the equivalent of around 7,000 single-use plastics shopping bags. The Covid-19 crisis has also highlighted the immense manual effort of shipping in flexitanks. Each bag has to be manufactured, in a closed environment, with people working in close proximity, then fitted into a freight container – probably by at least two people working together – and then filled with its cargo. It then has to be unloaded at the destination, the bag removed from the container and then transported for disposal. At each stage, people are involved. In comparison, a tank container – which will make between 200 and 300 loaded movements during its lifetime – can be loaded and discharged by one person. There are other issues surrounding the disposal of flexitanks. While users and producers stress that they are recyclable, they avoid the issue that they are not reusable. And, while some new recycling
