Your first export container: the packaging checklist

1. Treatment and marking

Every solid wood component crossing the border needs to be debarked, heat treated to 56°C core for 30 continuous minutes, and marked with a registered IPPC stamp: pallets, crates, skids, dunnage, blocking, bracing.

Exempt: plywood, OSB and other engineered wood; plastic and metal; anything under 6 mm thick.

Order treated blocking timber at the same time as the pallets. It is a line item, not a special request, and it removes the failure mode described in dunnage: the compliance blind spot.

2. Bracing — most damage is internal

A container is not a gentle environment. It is lifted, stacked, rolled at sea, and set down hard. What damages freight is almost never external impact; it is the load moving inside its own packaging.

Three principles cover most of it:

• Block against the walls, not against other freight. Freight settles; walls do not.

• Fill voids. An empty gap is a runway. Airbags, timber blocking or void fill, but fill it.

• Restrain vertically as well as horizontally. A load that cannot slide can still tip.

For machinery and high-value items, a purpose-built crate with internal blocking is cheaper than the alternative. See crates, boxes and skids.

3. Moisture — the problem nobody expects

A sealed steel container crossing an ocean goes through large daily temperature swings. Warm humid air inside condenses on the cold steel roof at night and rains back onto the cargo. This is called container rain and it ruins more shipments than rough handling.

Three contributors, all controllable:

• Wet packaging. Wood loaded above about 19% moisture releases water inside the box. This is one of the strongest arguments for kiln-dried material on export lanes, and it is a separate question from heat treatment — see materials.

• Wet product. Anything hygroscopic loaded damp.

• Humid loading air. Loading on a humid Ohio August afternoon seals that air in with the cargo.

Desiccants and moisture barrier bags handle the residue. Dry packaging handles the cause.

4. Outside marking

The people handling your container at the far end will not read your packing list. They will read the box.

• Centre of gravity, marked on at least two sides

• Sling points, if it is to be lifted by anything other than forks

• This-way-up, if orientation matters

• Gross weight

• The IPPC mark, visible on two opposite sides while loaded

Marks should be legible from several feet away and should not be in red or orange, which are reserved for hazard marking.

5. What to do a week before

• Confirm treatment is scheduled, not assumed. It is a batch process — a same-day request costs more and risks the sailing.

• Physically separate treated stock from everything else.

• Remove untreated scrap timber from the loading area entirely.

• Check every mark is legible and will stay visible when loaded.

• Photograph the packed load before the doors close. It costs nothing and settles claims.

If any of that is unclear, ask before the container is booked rather than after. We would rather answer five questions than watch a shipment sit at a port — see heat treating and ISPM-15.