Container-handling accord at Rotterdam

Rotterdam’s stevedores, APMT MVII, APMTR, ECT and RWG, have made agreements with each other on transporting containers between their facilities at the port’s expanding Maasvlakte terminals.

The purpose is to organise inter-terminal transport as efficiently as possible, in the interests of all links in the supply chain because, the port authority said, with two new container terminals going into operation at Maasvlakte, a large numbers of containers are expected to be exchanged in the coming years.

Rotterdam is being expanded to cater for the expectation that it will have to annually handle an extra 17m teu by 2033. Last year its throughput was 12.3m, a rise of 5.8% on 2013.