If your business uses IBC containers, you, and only you are responsible for ensuring that they are correctly stored and transported.

Why? IBC containers often contain toxic chemicals and substances such as weed killer or pesticides, god forbid if these were to leak into the ground and potentially pollute rivers or streams. Certain chemical substances can harm, or even kill, animals with even the tiniest of spills. If this was to get into rivers and streams it could even affect drinking water locally, too.

What are IBCs?

IBCs, or Intermediate Bulk Containers, are an industrial grade, reusable containers designed for handling, transportation and storage of fluids. They are most commonly 1000L in capacity and have numerous advantages over the normal steel or plastic drums that are slowly being phased out.

Most notably, handling of IBCs is much easier - they can be safely moved around using a forklift truck, unlike moving drums on a pallet that would need to be strapped down or banded to keep them from falling.

Construction of IBCs

Although IBC containers are usually constructed to have a metal grid housing around the main plastic container to protect it against bashes and dents, this will only protect the unit up to a certain point where it will then become useless - yes, useless. Say you are lifting the container with a forklift or if you're in a farm telehandler, what's to stop you taking your eye off the ball and puncturing the plastic housing with your forks accidentally? The forks won't be stopped by the protective metal cage because they are too small and will fit through the gaps without you even noticing until half of the contents is spilling out - which you've now got to deal with!

The protective metal housing, that is designed to protect the plastic IBC container is also only able to work for certain protective purposes… so what’s the point?

Movement of half full IBCs - warning!

Although movement by forklift seems like a relatively easy task, the movement of a half empty IBC container is a whole different ball game. The centre of gravity is constantly shifting due to the "sloshing" effect caused by the additional room inside the container and the movement of the unit.

When moving with a forklift it would be easy for the IBC to slip off the forks as you brake due to the built up momentum of liquid in the container.

Movement of IBCs when you can't access a forklift

Moving the IBC could be a tricky exercise, now imagine you don’t have a forklift to do it!

I’ve seen so many people thinking that they can sling around the metal frame and use a tractor or similar to lift and move an IBC… don’t do it!

First of all, the protective metal frame is simply that… to help protect the plastic container and not to help you lift your full IBC around because you think it’s easier. There are, however, special IBC lifting frames that can work in conjunction with cranes or lifting hooks to get over the hurdle.

IBC lifting frames

Warning! Lifting an IBC by crane using a specially designed frame is a VERY difficult and specialist task and shouldn’t be taken lightly. In 2018 an incident occurred offshore when a vessel crane was being used with a certified lifting device to lift and move an IBC containing 1000kg of liquid. As the IBC was moved, the liquid was sloshed around which changed the centre of gravity. This change in the centre of gravity caused the IBC to rotate, resulting in the lift rigging device being unable to support the load causing the IBC to fall approximately 3.5m to the deck, spilling its entire contents.

Whilst this drop luckily has not caused any fatalities, you can see that using the wrong equipment and not taking care whilst using them can potentially turn into a disaster.

Decanting contents of an IBC

An IBC has a large diameter filling hole located at the top face of the unit. This is to allow for easy filling. The IBC has a smaller diameter emptying hole located on the front face of the unit near the bottom designed for easy decanting of the contents.

Because the of the location of the emptying hole, decanting the entire contents of the IBC without having to lift the container at the rear to an angle is very difficult. As the contents contained within the IBC becomes less and less, the flow rate at which the contents escapes will become less and less also.

Safe storage of IBCs

By law, when storing IBC containers, the bund is required to contain 110% of the total container capacity. This is 10% more than what the container could hold... I stress the word “could” because people may think they only have to bund up to 110% of what they intend to store in the container, but this is untrue. Even if you only intend to store liquid up to half way of the IBC, the law states that it is the container total capacity that our 110% should be based on, not what we are storing.

If you are storing multiple IBCs in a bund, the bund capacity should be 110% of the capacity of the largest IBC or 25% of the total volume stored, whichever is greater.