Receiving and checking a caustic soda shipment

A container of caustic soda flakes is 25 tonnes of a corrosive, hygroscopic chemical that has spent weeks at sea. Ten careful checks at the warehouse door protect both your people and your production. This is the routine we recommend to every customer.

Before the container arrives

• Match the paperwork: the COA batch number, packing list, bill of lading and container number should all agree. We send these with loading photos and the seal number before departure — keep them handy.
• Prepare PPE and equipment: gloves, goggles, sampling scoop, clean sealed sample bottles, pallet space in a dry bay.
• Book unloading labour that understands Class 8 cargo — torn bags are a handling problem, not just a spill.

At the door

• Check the seal number against the bill of lading before breaking it.
• Look at the stow as doors open: bags should be dry, flat-stacked, with no water stains on the container floor or roof — roof condensation is the classic cause of wet top layers.
• Count bags and check markings against the packing list; photograph anything damaged before moving it.

Sampling and testing

• Sample from several bags across the load — front, middle and back, top and bottom — and composite or test separately.
• Assay is checked by simple acid titration; any competent QC lab can verify 99% within an hour.
• Squeeze-test the bags: fresh flakes flow; hard caked lumps mean moisture ingress somewhere in the chain.
• Keep retained samples sealed and labelled with the batch number until the lot is fully consumed.

If something is off-specification

Stop feeding the material to production, photograph everything, keep the seals, bags and samples, and contact us with the batch number and your test results. A documented claim with retained samples is solved in days; an undocumented complaint months later helps nobody. If you ordered third-party inspection (SGS or BV), their loading-port report is your reference baseline.

Related: how to store the material once accepted · documents that travel with every shipment.