Security seals are now being used in the transportation industry to make sure that trailers, containers and rail cars carrying products are not tampered with. This is done to protect the final destination ports of the products as well as to protect the end user of the product. A container shipped from overseas to a USA port needs to be secured so that upon arrival it is safe to open and also a trailer carrying food products from Canada to the USA needs to be secured as well because the consumer needs to be protected from someone tampering with the food supply.

C-TPAT requires that all trailers, containers, and rail cars entering the USA are secured so that customs officers can check to make sure that the load was not tampered with between the origin point and the destination. These security seals have to meet the criteria of ISO17712 so that they are hard to cut and harder yet to tamper with. In October 2008 all major shipping lines made it mandatory that any freight they are carrying will have a ISO17712 approved high security seal.

There are two main types of security seals:

Bolt Seals - Used mainly on containers as they are very hard to cut, usually requiring bolt cutters with 36-inch long handles, and the container is arriving at a facility that has these tools to open the container.

Cable Seals - Used mainly on rail cars and trailers, as they are easier to cut, as the driver usually has to cut them off of the truck trailers themselves and carrying the big bolt cutters inside the truck isn't recommended by customs.

Security Seals have two main purposes: First is to show if they cargo has been tampered with, did anyone enter the trailer or container after the load left the warehouse. Second, to prevent theft as the bolt seals are very hard to cut and without proper tools they won't be cut.

Security seals are not meant to prevent anyone from tampering with the cargo, they are meant to show if someone did tamper with the cargo. This is an important difference as most shippers think that the security seal offers more protection than it really does. The security seal is designed so that if it is tampered with it can't be reused to hide the tampering. A quality security seal, one approved by ISO17712 and used for C-TPAT should be unusable after being tampered with. It should theoretically be destroyed.

Due to the strict compliance required by ISO17712 and C-TPAT there are only five to six main manufacturers as the factories have to maintain ISO9001 standards to show that the quality obtained from the samples that are tested holds true when mass production is carried out.

If your company is using security seals you have to make sure that the quality is there as the cost of a trailer, container or rail car showing up unsecured would be very high. Your load would not be allowed to enter the USA and would be held until a full investigation by the customs officers was carried out in order to determine what happened and to decide if the load is safe to enter the country.