If you hang out with shipping container engineers, builders, designers or startups, inevitably you will hear the conversations start to involve a wide range of acronyms including ANSI, NIST, ISO, IMO, BIC and usually CSC.

CSC is an abbreviation for the International Convention for Safe Containers. The Convention incorporates a series of design requirements (e.g., very precise dimensions at each corner of the container so that equipment that lifts and moves containers can always find the holes in each corner casting), minimum functionality and weather tightness plus various measurements of capacity, weight and resistance to the amazing forces that containers receive while underway at sea on ships or on land with trains and trucks. The purpose of the Convention is to insure that containers are safe and consistently built. The taxonomy for the standards that are the basis for CSC testing is complicated and involves the United Nations, the International Maritime Organization, the International Standards Organization, various national standards organizations (e.g. ANSI and NIST in the USA) and a structured set of committees and working groups that focus on specific design or use issues.

If you want to design, build and operate a shipping container (or have someone else own and operate a shipping container based on your design that is going to transit multiple countries using multiple means of transport) the container will need to have a ‘CSC Plate’ based on a CSC Certificate – a metal plate affixed to the container that indicates that the container passed certain tests (or re-tests), met certain minimum standards for capacity, weight and resistance to forces.