Thirteen international posts receive permission to ship lithium batteries

Thirteen international postal companies have received permission to accept and ship itemscontaining lithium batteries within their national and international post and parcel systems after

The new rules, which only allow small quantities of lithium batteries to be carried within thepostal system and only if installed within electronic equipment, aim to strike a balance for poststhat recognises the importance of e-commerce consumer-electronics shipments for the businesses ofpostal operators and the desire to limit the risks associated with this traffic.

Large numbers of shipments of undeclared dangerous goods or prohibited commodities are known toalready be shipped within national and international postal and parcels systems, including by air,a fact that has been highlighted by recent increases in the scanning of shipments by securityauthorities, in particular following the high-profile incidents where explosives were found inprinter cartridges in air express shipments from Yemen. The issue has also been highlighted by thecrash of UPS flight 006 in Dubai in 2010, in which the final accident report published this weekstrongly implicated lithium battery shipments on the flight as the cause or a contributing factorin the accident.

Akhilesh Mathur, supply chain co-ordinator for the Universal Postal Union (UPU), toldCEP-Research that it was in every postal operator’s interest to have the ability to ship and exportitems containing lithium batteries, “because e-commerce customers want to order things like camerasand laptops online, so we’re providing posts with training materials, developed in consultationwith ICAO. We’re giving them help and encouraging them to contact their respective civil aviationauthority (CAA).

He said ICAO had told posts and the UPU that “they realised how important it was to e-commerceissues to have the ability to ship items containing lithium batteries, but they had to follow thesame requirements that everybody else does. And so we have imposed all these conditions on theposts, which they are fulfilling,” he said. “It is about educating the customer and also trainingpostal staff to detect anything untoward.”

He said ICAO and the UPU had worked out arrangements where individual posts could get approvalfrom their respective CAA – which gets its facts from ICAO’s Dangerous Goods Panel – developing atraining syllabus in collaboration with the CAA for all personnel that accept postal items.Approval required the post to satisfy its CAA that it has implemented and documented the necessarytraining and education programme for staff and customers – including emergency procedures andreporting requirements in case there is a fire, for example.

Mathur said the first posts received permission to ship lithium batteries last November “andevery couple of weeks we receive a notification from another country saying ‘okay, we are now readyto export items containing lithium batteries’.”

The list of posts currently permitted is: Australia Post, Empresa de Correos de Chile, PostDanmark, Royal Mail, Hungary’s Magyar Posta, Japan Post, PostNL, New Zealand Post, Norway Post,Saudi Post, Singapore Post, Sweden’s Posten, and the US Postal Service – which was the first toqualify.

Mathur said that, under ICAO’s rules, any postal operator could receive cross-border itemscontaining the permitted lithium batteries from one of the posts that had been permitted to shipthem. “Once the item has arrived in the country, the danger to aviation is over, even if the itemis to be shipped on to another country or is going by air within that country,” he explained. “Thedanger is over because the item has already been screened and is properly packed at origin. So acountry does not require approval to accept items containing lithium batteries from anotherinternational post.”

However, some posts are refusing to accept shipments containing lithium batteries into theirsystem, even when coming from posts that have been given permission to send them internationally.For example, Germany’s Deutsche Post, has informed the UPU that it had “carefully examined therevised regulations and requirements of both the UPU and the International Civil AviationOrganization (ICAO) and until further notice, Deutsche Post will continue to prohibit lithiumbatteries and cells in mail shipments. This applies to all categories of items and to outbound andinbound international mail alike, including both open and closed transit mail. It does not apply toairline transfer/transshipments.”

Mathur disputed the suggestion that some postal operators that had not yet obtained permissionto accept and ship items containing lithium batteries were routinely flouting the rules. He said: “There will always be a small percentage of shipments which don’t conform to the rules, but ingeneral no – it is not like these items were flowing freely beforehand. But it is obviously an areathat others want to get into as cross-border e-commerce continues to expand.”

However, dangerous goods and postal experts have told CEP-Research that the growth of e-commercehad created increasing numbers of customers that shipped lithium batteries, dangerous goods orprohibited items undeclared in domestic and international postal systems, either deliberatelyignoring or in ignorance of the rules.

The dangerous goods (DG) coordinator for one UK air cargo handling company this week toldCEP-Research: “What they are trying to do is regulate and deal with a problem which has beenoccurring on a growing basis over the years. Even within the UK, a fair bit of mail is flown aroundthe country.

“Up until this year DG in mail was basically prohibited, whether it was domestic orinternational. Previously this went largely undetected, but with the increased use of x-rayequipment for the scanning of mails before being flown, then more frequently packages of undeclaredDG were found.”

Another dangerous goods expert agreed, adding: “It’s basically legalising something which is inpractice for decades.” He paid credit to countries and postal operators that had taken the troubleto become certified to ship lithium batteries and certain other dangerous goods, highlighting USPSand the UK’s Royal Mail.

He added: “While I see some merit in the UK regulator’s approach, since they do have a robustframework to exercise at least some control (although how much remains to be seen), I have neverunderstood why in certain otherwise overregulated markets – Germany comes to mind – anything may beshipped without questions asked.”

He continued: “German post offices and post acceptance points in stores neither show any warningposters nor has their staff received any training about hidden DG. Every time I ask a postalemployee whether ‘nitric acid’ or ‘untested Lithium batteries in a model plane’ could be shipped,at best I’m advised to use sufficient cushioning material.”

He added: “It must also be said that DG falling under the US ORM-D provisions is for decadespermitted within US domestic mail – and the experiences there are actually encouraging. USPStraditionally educated their staff about basic hazmat requirements and hidden DG in particular, andcompared to the number of DG shipments being transported, the number of incidents and accidents isactually rather low.”

A spokesman for Deutsche Post DHL told CEP-Research: “According to the general terms andconditions of Deutsche Post AG for the international parcel service, lithium batteries aredangerous goods and therefore excluded from carriage”, although he said DHL Express permits theinternational carriage of lithium batteries “under certain conditions”.

He added: “The situation in Germany is a bit different. According to the general terms andconditions of Deutsche Post AG for the domestic mail service and the general terms and conditionsof DHL for the domestic parcel/express service, the carriage of lithium batteries in the roadnetwork is permitted under certain conditions. In certain cases, they have to be classified as ‘dangerous goods’,” referring to ‘Regulations on the carriage of dangerous substances and articles,Class 9’.

He explained that shipments using the company’s ‘Electroreturn’ service – for recyclingelectrical and electronic items – were only transported in the company’s national road network.