Hazardous Materials Support

Overview

Shipium handles shipping the most common types of hazardous materials (hazmat), including:

• Limited Quantities (LQ) (also known as ORMD, although this term was phased out in January 2021) products. Examples include small cosmetics and some healthcare products.
• Lithium Ion Products. A common example is LiO batteries found in many electronics items, for which we simplify some details for you.
• Generalized hazardous material. You can specify IATA/DOT details for any hazardous materials directly.

Specifying LQ/ORMD product for US domestic shipping

As a shortcut, we support adding a productDetails array entry of "limited_quantity". See the LQ example below.

Specifying hazardous materials

Hazardous materials information is provided within shipments as part of the orderItemProperties map, either using the standard Shipment construction or using the more popular Carrier and Method Selection with Label Single Call mechanism.

In addition to other item properties that are passed, such as productId and quantity, you can specify a set of hazmat-related properties in order to make sure that these products are properly handled at the carrier-level and during carrier selection.

There are two ways to do this:

• For common hazmat classes, Shipium provides a shortcut mechanism and does much of the lookup on your behalf. The most common of these is the lithium ion classes for common electronics items, specified by property "category". The properties are shown in the table below in Pre-Configured Hazardous Materials Properties.

• By specifying detailed hazardous materials properties using the properties defined in Defining Detailed Hazardous Materials Properties below and setting the category property to the value "defined".

Pre-configured Hazardous Materials properties

This table shows common hazmat classes covered by the ShipTime shortcut mechanism:

Defining detailed Hazardous Materials properties

If your shipment contains hazardous materials that cannot be included using the above pre-configured interface, use the following properties to specify the details and set the category property to the value "defined".

Examples

Non-Hazardous Materials example

This example shows a sample orderItems entry for a shipment which contains no hazmat items:

"orderItemQuantities": [
  {
        "productId": "PRODUCTID001",
        "quantity": 1
    },
  {
        "productId": "PRODUCTID002",
        "quantity": 2
    },
]

Hazardous Materials example: Limited quantity/ORMD

This example shows an orderItems entry for a shipment which contains two items: one with no hazmat properties and one ORMD/LQ product:

"orderItemQuantities": [
  {
        "productId": "PRODUCTID001",
        "quantity": 1
    },
  {
        "productId": "PRODUCTID002",
        "quantity": 2,
        "productDetails": ["limited_quantity"]
    }
]

Hazardous Materials example: Product containing lithium ion batteries

This example shows an orderItems entry for a shipment which contains two items: one with no hazmat properties and one which contains a lithium ion battery:

"orderItemQuantities": [
    {
        "productId": "PRODUCTID001",
        "quantity": 1
    },
    {
        "hazmat": true,
        "hazmatInfo": {
            "category": "contains_lithium_ion",
            "quantity": 1.0,
            "quantityType": "gross",
            "quantityUnits": "g"
        },
        "productId": "PRODUCTIDHAZ1",
        "quantity": 3
    }
],

Hazardous Materials example: Detailed Hazardous Materials properties

This example shows an orderItems entry for a shipment containing two items, one containing chromic acid solution and one with no hazmat properties. Note that category is set to "defined":

"orderItemQuantities": [
    {
        "hazmat": true,
        "hazmatInfo": {
            "category": "defined",
            "hazmatId": "UN1755",
            "containerType": "aluminum_jerrican",
            "packingGroup": "ii",
            "properShippingName": "Chromic Acid Solution",
            "hazardClass": "8",
            "subsidiaryClasses": [
                "8.1"
            ],
            "quantity": 5.0,
            "quantityType": "net",
            "quantityUnits": "l"
        },
        "productDetails": [],
        "productId": "PRODUCTID001",
        "quantity": 3
    }
],