Author : Dennis Culnan

“For more than four decades the dockside workers from Delaware River Stevedores (DRS) have teamed with the South Jersey Port Corporation’s (SJPC) crews to deliver the reliable, drama-free, high-quality, efficient services that our mutual customers depend upon,” Andy Saporito, said the CEO of SJPC.
“We’ve had a very long and successful business at the South Jersey Port terminals because of our mutual goals and collaboration,” explained Robert W. Palaima, DRS’s president. “Our mutual success is built on the tonnage we move through the SJPC terminals, and the more cargo we handle, the more jobs with good salaries and benefits we create.”

It’s a successful partnership from the dock to the warehouse to the office. It’s built on mutual respect, shared experience, and almost indistinguishable except for logos on the hardhat. Everyone knows their task – as well as that of their partners – and they are always flexible to deal with the inevitable variables: weather, late arrivals, special-handling cargo.

It requires choreography of an always-changing, international, multi-lingual cast of dockside gangs, ship crews, truckers, and railroad crews. “Our crews are a Swiss Army Knife of adaptability to always-changing cargo,” says Palaima. “Whether it’s specialty steel or cattle, our expertise in special handling and our adaptability is key to our ‘trust’ formula.”

Tata Steel Europe invested its trust in the ability of the SJ Port / DRS partnership to handle their steel shipments to the American industrial heartland during the winter months. Initially, it started out small but as the SJ Port / DRS partnership exceeded expectations, the business relationship has grown exponentially – even beyond the ice season.

At South Jersey Port Corporation in Camden, DRS handles breakbulk steel from Northern Europe and Korea, cocoa beans from Ivory Coast, and plywood from Malaysia and Indonesia. Major customers include Clipper Steel Services, Tata Steel Europe, Thyssen Krupp Steel North America, ArcelorMittal, Western Bulk Carriers, Oldendorff, Unicargo, SK Shipping Co., Ltd., PACC Line PTE, Ltd. and John Lawrie Tubulars.

DRS generates more than 650,000-man-hours per year in the tri-state area of the Philadelphia- Camden Port and is known for its ability to handle just about any type of cargo—from steel to cars to cocoa beans—even massive beer-making tanks from Germany to satisfy the demand for local breweries.
That all translates into jobs – good-paying, family-sustaining jobs – which is a key goal of the South Jersey Port Corporation.

“We are all hungry and we never forget how competitive our industry is,” added CEO Saporito. “We all recognize our jobs – from our administrative offices to the wharves to the security gates and the warehouses – depend on our customers – our current customers and future customers. We only succeed if they succeed.” “That’s the focus of our partnership,” Palaima emphasized. “Happy, successful customers and jobs!”

The SJPC anticipates winter steel volumes, savaged by the COVID-19 global recession and punishing tariffs, will increase significantly this winter as manufacturers replenish inventories to gear up production as COVID-19 vaccines come online.

Manufacturers and steel importers depend on the South Jersey Port as a trusted link in their supply chain.

With harsh winters closing the Saint Lawrence Seaway by creating unsafe, unreliable shipping to Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, steel shippers have opted for SJPC’s safer, more reliable Balzano Marine Terminal for their winter shipments to the industrial Mid-West.

Teaming with Delaware River Stevedores(DRS), SJPC has had an excellent multi-year experience in handling steel year-round but critically during the winter months. The entire team is very customer-focused. We work with the customers. We listen and we respond.

We are very sensitive to the careful and timely handling of our steel coils off the ship, onto trucks, onto rail cars, into warehouses, and out of the terminal and onto the customer. We work to earn our customers’ trust and business.

“We take it very seriously,” Andy Saporito, Executive Director and CEO explained. “We develop a close working relationship and mutual confidence between the shipper and our terminal partners DRS. Our shared focus is customer satisfaction, our customer’s success is our success.”

The SJPC’s deepwater ports are highly efficient terminals with dock-side rail and warehousing. They are within a day’s truck haul of the northeast, the midwestern industrial base of the United States and eastern Canada. A roll of steel off-loaded in our terminals, can arrive at plants throughout the Midwest, eastern Canada and from Montreal to the Carolinas in as little as a half a day…and it arrives as pristine as humanly possible.

Committed to ensuring seamless cargo movement from ship to dockside rail, we recently completed a rebuild of our rail loading dock and rail siding in time for the winter steel season and are investing $7 million – financed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) for further upgrades. NJDOT has provided SJPC over $10 million in the last five years for rail improvement projects through the state’s Rail Freight Assistance Program (RFAP). “Whether on the road, rail or in the water, strong transportation access is at the heart of economic success,” NJDOT Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti said.

Approximately 40% of the winter steel moving through SJPC’s Balzano Marine Terminal in Camden is transported by “Class A” rail to Mid-West and Mid-South manufacturing locations in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.

Safe handling is a critical component to the ongoing success of the program. Recently we installed high-intensity lighting in warehouses devoted to steel storage and we hold regular quality control meetings with Tata and Thyssen Krupp to adhere to safe handling standards aimed at minimizing worker injuries and damage to steel coils.

Our team has become experts in the safe and careful handling of these very expensive rolls of steel and we are focused on zero damage.

Tata Steel Europe and Thyssen Krupp Steel North America use the Balzano Marine Terminal throughout the year but particularly during the winter to bring steel coils from the Netherlands and Germany to their manufacturing plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio and to other buyers throughout the Midwest.

In 2019, Tata Steel International and Thyssen Krupp Steel accounted for 16% of the SJPC steel imports.

NLMK, the Russian steel company, accounts for over 60% of SJPC’s total ferrous product imports, operating year-round at our Paulsboro Marine Terminal to supply their three U.S. finishing plants.

Tariffs on steel imports combined with the COVID pandemic depressed our steel import business in 2020, particularly NLMK’s imports from Russia. Imports of Brazilian steel are now ramping to marginally mitigate the decline in Russian steel imports but Brazilian volume is constrained by quota limits.

The SJPC expects that trend to reverse this season as vaccines to neutralize the virus come online and a new administration takes over in Washington help to reinvigorate the global economy and consumer demand.

A key indicator of the strength of our winter steel business and a harbinger of things to come will be the first quarter of 2021. While still early in the anticipated recovery, the strength of our winter steel business through January, February, and March will be a good indicator of the anticipated rebound.

The South Jersey Port is taking steps to reduce energy and to increase sustainability in our operations. We are working on many fronts – from investments in energy-efficient equipment to the development of offshore wind.

One such initiative is our Green Energy Lighting Project. The project will provide our employees with better lighting, reduce our energy costs, and dramatically reduce our carbon footprint – a trifecta.
We’ve invested $500,000 in clean, carbon-neutral LED lighting throughout our terminals. The new lighting will reduce our electric bill by $77,000 per year, paying off our investment in less than seven years. Given the 15-year longevity of LED bulbs and increasing energy costs, the port will realize dramatic savings for years to come. We are also storing the old bulbs to be used as replacements in other buildings to further save money and eliminate waste.

When crews complete the project, we will realize a 600,000-kilowatt-hours reduction in electricity consumption, further helping to reduce the demand on the electrical grid. This is enough energy savings to offset the usage of 73 homes. The bottom line is that we all must do our part to minimize greenhouse gases for the sake of our planet and our livelihood.

Camden, N.J. – Americans need their chocolate fix – even more in a pandemic – and it’s the South Jersey Port’s mission to help satisfy it.

On December 16, the annual flow of high-quality cocoa beans from West Africa will begin a month early when 215,000 sacks of cocoa beans are off-loaded at the Joseph A. Balzano Marine Terminal in Camden from the ship “Four Diamonds.”

“Working with our partners, Camden International Commodities Terminals and Delaware River Stevedores, we’ve become the premier cocoa bean import terminal on the East Coast,” Andy Saporito, CEO and Executive Director of SJPC.

The cocoa bean business means more jobs. In addition to the scores of full-time terminal workers, hundreds of local day-laborers are hired throughout the season to sort, store, and handle millions of sacks of cocoa beans for final processing by major confectionary companies including chocolate giants: Hershey, Mars, and Blommer.

Last year,  two million burlap bags (40,000 tons) of cocoa beans were slung off ships by DRS stevedores, onto SJPC’s patented trolleys, and hauled immediately by Champion Trucking into the CICT warehouse across the street from the Balzano Terminal.

“Our process at South Jersey Port is far more efficient than containerized beans,” Jeff Wheeler, president of CICT explained. “We eliminate that additional step of loading and unloading millions of bags of beans from containers – both here and at the source.”

“It is a seamless team effort from ship to warehouse honed over 20 years of expert experience to deliver every bean,” added Robert Palaima of Delaware River Stevedores.  

It’s hard manual work, a South Jersey Port expertise.

“It’s the hardest work on the waterfront,” Wheeler added. “We’ll be offloading 215,000 bags from the ‘Four Diamonds.’ Each bag weighs 150 pounds! Our people don’t shy away from it. They’ve developed the skills that make our terminal the most efficient handler of chocolate gold.”

“For most of our day-labor crews, it’s a family affair: fathers and sons, aunts and nieces, brother and sister, uncles and nephews. And they’re getting a nice payday before Christmas. We’re all excited when the ship comes in!”

The 14,000 tons of beans brought in by the “Four Diamonds” is the first installment on what is hoped to be a rebounding cocoa bean import business that was damaged last year by market effects of COVID-19.

Chocolate is an impulse buy and perfecting the balance of supply and demand has been extraordinarily complex as confectionary companies realign their marketing strategies from brick and mortar stores to digital in order to energize sales.

“We believe we’re going to see a significant rebound in chocolate demand, especially as vaccines against COVID come online,” said Wheeler. “Cocoa bean inventories in the U.S. are comparatively low, need to be replenished and, as consumption ticks up, so will the need for more imports.” 

The West African import season runs through April and is followed by months of imports of cocoa beans from evolving Central American growers.