[NHCOLL-L:4208] IATA Excepted Quantity package data for ICAO meeting in May

[Bentley, Andrew Charles]

Hi all

 

As part of my ongoing effort to resolve issues concerning the shipping of dangerous goods, recent contact with IATA indicates their willingness to work with us to have specific verbiage inserted into the IATA regulations through discussion at the next ICAO meeting in May of this year.  Brendan Sullivan from IATA has requested that I provide them with a letter of motivation for inclusion of this text and that together with this I provide some statistical data to add weight to our request.  Obviously, the larger the traffic in these packages, the more of a case we have with ICAO for inclusion of text specifically addressing natural history specimen packages - specifically we would be looking for an exemption for natural history packages packaged in accordance with IATA 2.7 Excepted Quantity regulations.  We already have a letter of interpretation from DOT as justification of this cause.  This would not only allow us to send international packages by USPS but also allow us to gain access to those countries that courier services are at present unable to ship within.  

 

What I require from you is an average of:

1.	Your Institution and Division - which will be used only to categorize data.  No Institution names or private data will be used in the final report to IATA/ICAO.

2.	An estimation of the yearly average number of packages that you ship internationally that contain dangerous goods (wet specimens or tissues in alcohols) - please include data for loan returns.

3.	Types of specimens shipped - fish, herps, mammals, birds, insects etc.
4.	An estimation of the number of specimens shipped in a year.

5.	Types of shipments most frequently shipped - wet whole specimens wrapped in cheesecloth, wet whole specimens in free alcohol, tissues in 95% ethanol etc. 

6.	Which countries these packages are shipped to and from - please include data for returning packages and packages sent on loan from external institutions.

Below is a form that you can use to report this data.  Simply reply to this message with the table filled in or cut and paste it into a new message.

Institution and Division name

 

Yearly average number of packages

 

Types of specimens shipped (please list all)

 

Yearly average number of specimens contained in these shipments

 

Types of shipments most frequently shipped (please list all)

 

Countries to which, and from which, these packages originate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can always extrapolate and average these figures to gain a sense of total packages per year but real data would carry much more weight.  Your help in this endeavor would be greatly appreciated and would benefit the entire community.  Please forward this message to others who you think may not be on this list or who ship specimens in this manner as the more data we can gather, the more of a case we can represent to ICAO.

 

Thanking you in advance

 

Andy

 

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Andy Bentley
Ichthyology Collection Manager/Specify Usability Lead
University of Kansas
Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center
Dyche Hall
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS, 66045-7561
USA

Tel: (785) 864-3863
Fax: (785) 864-5335
Email: ABentley at ku.edu       
                                                
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