Some obligations of a warehouse operator in light of regulations on the transport of dangerous goods

The primary legal acts regulating issues related to the operation of warehouse enterprises are the Act of November 16, 2000, on Public Warehouses and the provisions of Title XXX of the Civil Code. Due to the potential specificity of items accepted into storage, detailed regulations governing the handling of specific types of goods with particular properties may also apply. Such a situation occurs in the case of taking custody of items of a

dangerous nature. A warehouse operator accepting such items for storage, wishing to act in accordance with applicable law, will have to refer to regulations that do not ostensibly concern them, in this case, the provisions of the Act on the Road Transport of Dangerous Goods and the contents of the ADR agreement annexes. Costs for the warehouse operator are already signaled by the content of Article 21 of the Act on the Road Transport of Dangerous Goods, according to which an entrepreneur and any other entity performing

the transport of dangerous goods or loading or unloading related to such transport is obliged to maintain internal supervision over these activities and, for this purpose, to appoint, at their own expense, a dangerous goods transport safety adviser, hereinafter referred to as the “adviser”. Although this provision does not apply to an entrepreneur or other entity performing the road transport of dangerous goods or loading or unloading of such goods related to this transport in quantities for which the ADR agreement does not require appropriate vehicle marking, this exemption will likely not be applicable very often in the case of a warehouse operator who decides to accept such cargo, which

is related to the very essence of operating a warehouse. The above means that even a single acceptance of dangerous goods in a given calendar year, delivered by a transport unit in quantities requiring the marking of said unit with orange warning plates, will result in the necessity of appointing a dangerous goods road transport safety adviser. There is no doubt that a warehouse operator can be considered an entity that performs the loading and unloading of such goods.