Shipping of Coconut Charcoal for Shisha: Declare VS Misdeclare

What is the difference between shipping as declared and Misdeclaration?

To Whom this article will be useful

This article is made for coconut charcoal briquette wholesale buyers. The one who is going to buy at least one sea container is 17-25 tons of charcoal.

What is the problem?

As probably you know already: most of the shipping lines don’t want to carry coconut charcoal. If you call the liner and ask them for the price: the answer will be: “sorry, we do not allow coconut charcoal on the vessel”.

It all started in earlier 2000s when MSC shipping lines get one of the containers on fire while shipping to Russia. Since then most of the shipping lines decline to carry coconut charcoal.

So how do you do shipping?

There are two ways of shipping coconut charcoal.

One is Declare or Mention coconut charcoal in the shipping documents such as Bill of Lading or B/L.

It means that in Bill of Lading we write that we are shipping coconut charcoal briquettes.

This is the most safest and recommended way for shipping coconut charcoal with Declare or mention method.

Most of the shipping lines treat coconut charcoal as Dangerous Goods (DG), not as General Cargo. Even in the MSDS, our coconut charcoal is stated as safe and not subjected to self-ignition based on the SHT test.

Dangerous Goods means that the container shell is placed on the special deck of the vessel, designed for dangerous goods. It makes the shipping more expensive.

Basically, shipping DG will cost you 30-100% more than shipping General Cargo. For example shipping general cargo to Newark, USA is 5-7 thousand USD. But the shipping of DG is 15-18 thousand USD.

The second method of shipping is Misdelcare (strongly not recommended)

Misdeclare means that in the Bill of Lading we mention, not coconut charcoal, but another “safe” product: like parquet, furniture, wooden handicrafts anything that is not charcoal.

With this method, you can get cheaper freight costs, as shipping lines accept you as General Cargo.

But if the shipping line will find out that you “misdeclaration” you will get a huge fine. ZIM shipping lines will charge you about 30.000 USD, CMA 20.000 USD, and so on. This is a huge amount of money compared with the costs of the goods.

Besides it, you as the buyer, shipping agent, and factory will be blacklisted from most shipping lines.

This is a big risk. Every year hundreds of containers with coconut charcoal are couched by shipping lines, stopped, and banned.

As a reliable coconut charcoal factory, we strongly suggest using Declare or Mention method while shipping charcoal.

If you have any questions please fill free to contact Greg for more information via WhatsApp, or Telegram: +6285328727291