Direct answer
MARPOL Annex V Regulation 10 carries three obligations. First, every ship of 12 metres or more in length overall, and every fixed or floating platform, displays placards that tell the crew and passengers the discharge requirements of Regulations 3, 4, 5, and 6, and of Polar Code Part II-A section 5.2 where it applies. The placard is in the crew’s working language and, on international voyages, also in English, French, or Spanish. Second, every ship of 100 gross tonnage and above, every ship certified to carry 15 or more persons, and every platform carries a written Garbage Management Plan that names a person in charge and follows the format in Resolution MEPC.220(63). Third, a Garbage Record Book is kept on the larger ships, on ships certified to carry 15 or more persons engaged on international voyages, and on platforms. That book has had a Part I (garbage) and Part II (cargo residues) since the MEPC.277(70) amendments took effect on 1 March 2018, records each discharge or incineration as it happens, is signed by the officer in charge and by the master, and stays on board for at least two years. Port State control may inspect it under Regulation 10.5. The discharge regime that the placard and the book document is set out in Regulation 4, Regulation 6, and the Annex V hub article.
Where Regulation 10 sits in the revised Annex
The revised MARPOL Annex V, adopted by Resolution MEPC.201(62) on 15 July 2011 and in force from 1 January 2013, runs from Regulation 1 (Definitions) to Regulation 11 (Port State control on operational requirements in the IMO consolidated layout, with the placards-and-records duties carried by Regulation 10). The substance flows in order: Regulation 3 bans all garbage discharge by default; Regulation 4 sets the limited permissions outside special areas; Regulation 5 covers fixed and floating platforms; Regulation 6 sets the stricter rules inside special areas; Regulation 7 lists the exceptions for safety, accident, and accidental gear loss; Regulation 8 requires reception facilities ashore; and Regulation 9 deals with port State control on operational requirements. Regulation 10 is the documentary backstop. It does not create a discharge right or a discharge ban of its own. It requires the ship to display, plan, and record what Regulations 3 through 7 permit and forbid.
That ordering matters for compliance work because Regulation 10 references the other regulations by number. The placard text under Regulation 10.1 points the reader to Regulations 3, 4, 5, and 6 and to Polar Code Part II-A section 5.2. The Garbage Management Plan under Regulation 10.2 has to describe procedures that keep the ship inside those limits. The Garbage Record Book under Regulation 10.3 has to capture each discharge or loss in enough detail that an inspector can test it against the same limits. A placard that lists the wrong distances, a plan that names no person in charge, or a record book with a discharge logged inside a prohibited zone are all Regulation 10 failures that surface against the Regulation 3 to 7 baseline.
The numbering deserves a note for anyone cross-checking against older or differently published copies of the Annex. The consolidated Annex V text does not break Regulation 10 into “10.1, 10.2, 10.3” the way some secondary reproductions do. The IMO text uses paragraphs numbered 1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 3, 3.1 to 3.6, 4, 5, and 6 within Regulation 10. This article uses the dotted form (Regulation 10.1, 10.2, 10.3) for readability, but the substance maps one-to-one onto the paragraph numbers in the Annex itself. Where a precise citation is needed for a deficiency report or a flag-State submission, cite the paragraph as the IMO numbers it, not as a secondary source renumbers it.
The placard requirement (Regulation 10.1)
What the placard must say and who must carry it
Regulation 10.1 requires every ship of 12 metres or more in length overall, and every fixed or floating platform, to display placards that notify the crew and passengers of the applicable discharge requirements of Regulations 3, 4, 5, and 6, and of section 5.2 of Part II-A of the Polar Code where the ship operates in polar waters. The threshold is stated as length overall, not gross tonnage and not deadweight. A small workboat of 13 metres falls inside the placard duty even though it sits well under the 100 GT plan threshold and the 400 GT (now 100 GT) record-book threshold. The drafting choice reflects the placard’s purpose: it is a crew-and-passenger notice, so the trigger is the physical size of the vessel that carries people, not its commercial tonnage.
The placard content is the disposal regime in summary form. It tells anyone on board, in plain terms, what may go over the side and where, and what may not. A compliant placard shows the categories of garbage, the minimum distances from the nearest land for the categories that can be discharged at sea (the 3 nautical mile comminuted and 12 nautical mile uncomminuted food-waste limits, the 12 nautical mile incinerator-ash limit, and so on), and the absolute prohibitions on plastics, cooking oil, operational wastes, fishing gear, and HME cargo residues. The specific permitted distances live in Regulation 4 and, inside designated zones, in Regulation 6, so the placard is a digest of those two regulations rather than a fresh rule.
Working language plus English, French, or Spanish
The language rule has two layers. The placard must be in the working language of the ship’s crew, so the people who actually handle the garbage can read it. For ships engaged in voyages to ports or offshore terminals under the jurisdiction of another Party to the Convention, the placard must also be in English, French, or Spanish. The second layer exists for the inspector and the visiting authority, the same three working languages used for the Garbage Record Book entries. A ship trading only within its own flag State’s waters can in principle carry a single-language placard; a ship on international voyages cannot.
In practice ship managers fit a single multilingual placard that satisfies both layers at once. The placards are weatherproof, sized to be read at the point of use, and placed where garbage is generated and handled: the galley, the mess and accommodation alleyways, the garbage room, and the deck areas near the disposal points. There is no IMO-mandated artwork, but the 2017 Guidelines for the implementation of MARPOL Annex V (Resolution MEPC.295(71)) and the Garbage Management Plan guidelines in Resolution MEPC.220(63) both encourage a clear, pictogram-supported layout so the message survives crew turnover and language gaps. A placard that has faded, been painted over, or quotes the pre-2013 discharge distances is a common and avoidable Regulation 10 deficiency.
The Polar Code overlay
The reference to section 5.2 of Part II-A of the Polar Code is the one piece of the placard duty that did not exist in the 2011 text as first drafted. The Polar Code (Resolution MEPC.264(68), read with MSC.385(94)) entered force on 1 January 2017 and tightened garbage discharge in Arctic and Antarctic waters beyond the Annex V special-area rules. Food waste discharge, permitted at sea under Regulation 4 outside special areas, is prohibited in polar waters under the Polar Code. A ship certificated for polar operation must reflect that on its placard so the crew does not apply the general 12 nautical mile food-waste rule where the stricter polar prohibition governs. The cross-reference keeps the placard honest for a ship that crosses from temperate into polar waters on the same voyage.
The Garbage Management Plan (Regulation 10.2)
Who must carry a plan
Regulation 10.2 requires every ship of 100 gross tonnage and above, every ship certified to carry 15 or more persons, and every fixed or floating platform to carry a Garbage Management Plan. The three triggers are independent. A ship meets the duty if it crosses any one of them. A 90 GT day-passenger vessel certified for 30 people is caught by the persons test even though it misses the tonnage test. A 120 GT cargo vessel with a crew of six is caught by the tonnage test even though it misses the persons test. The plan threshold sits below the original record-book threshold, which is why a ship between 100 and 400 GT historically carried a plan but not a record book, a gap the MEPC.360(79) amendment closed in 2024 by pulling the record-book threshold down to match the plan threshold at 100 GT.
The 15-persons test counts everyone the ship is certified to carry, crew and passengers together, not the number actually on board for a given voyage. The figure comes from the ship’s certificates, the Passenger Ship Safety Certificate or the Minimum Safe Manning Document and accommodation arrangements, not from a headcount at the gangway. An inspector reads the certificate, not the muster list.
What the plan must contain
The plan must give written procedures for minimizing, collecting, storing, processing, and disposing of garbage, including the use of the equipment on board, and it must designate the person or persons in charge of carrying it out. That sentence is the whole legal core of Regulation 10.2. Everything else is detail the IMO guidelines add to make the plan usable. The plan is ship-specific. A generic template that names no equipment, no storage location, and no responsible officer does not satisfy the regulation even if it recites the right categories.
The format follows the 2012 Guidelines for the development of garbage management plans, Resolution MEPC.220(63), adopted on 2 March 2012 for compliance with Regulation 10 of the revised Annex V. MEPC.220(63) replaced the earlier guidelines in Resolution MEPC.71(38) and is written to the revised category structure. A plan built to MEPC.220(63) sets out, section by section: the procedures for collecting garbage from each generating area (galley, accommodation, machinery space, deck and cargo areas); the procedures for processing it, meaning comminution, compaction, and incineration where the ship has that equipment; the storage arrangements, including segregation by category and the designated storage locations and containers; and the disposal routes, meaning permitted discharge at sea under the applicable regulation or delivery to a port reception facility. The plan names the equipment, states its capacity, and ties each step to a responsible position on board.
The designated person in charge
The “person or persons in charge” requirement is the practical hinge of the whole plan. MARPOL puts overall compliance on the master, but the plan has to name who actually runs the garbage system day to day. On most merchant ships that is the chief officer for general garbage, with the chief engineer responsible for the incinerator, the compactor, and machinery-space waste, and the galley staff responsible for food-waste segregation at source. The plan documents that allocation so it survives a crew change. An inspector who finds a current plan with a named person in charge, and then interviews that person and gets a coherent account of how garbage moves from the galley bin to the reception facility receipt, has strong evidence of a working system. An inspector who finds a plan naming a rank that has been vacant for two voyages has evidence of a paper system, which is itself a deficiency.
Implementation, not just possession, is what PSC tests. A plan that is present, current, and flag-approved but plainly not followed (mixed categories in the garbage room, an incinerator logged as used that has been out of service, a person in charge who cannot describe the procedure) is treated as a deficiency in the same way an absent plan is. The 2017 implementation guidelines in MEPC.295(71) and the underlying MEPC.220(63) format both assume the plan is a live operating document, supported by the training section the guidelines call for, not a certificate kept in a drawer.
The Garbage Record Book (Regulation 10.3)
Who must keep a record book, and the moving threshold
This is the part of Regulation 10 where the consolidated text and the brief’s reference instruments diverge, and the divergence is worth stating precisely. As adopted in the 2011 revision (MEPC.201(62)) and as amended by MEPC.277(70), Regulation 10.3 required a Garbage Record Book on every ship of 400 gross tonnage and above, every ship certified to carry 15 or more persons engaged in voyages to ports or offshore terminals under the jurisdiction of another Party to the Convention, and every fixed or floating platform. Those are the thresholds carried in the consolidated MEPC.201(62) plus MEPC.277(70) Annex that the brief asks the article to verify against, and they are correct for that consolidation.
The threshold then changed. Resolution MEPC.360(79), adopted on 16 December 2022 and in force on 1 May 2024, lowered the tonnage trigger in Regulation 10.3 from 400 gross tonnage to 100 gross tonnage. The persons trigger (15 or more, on international voyages) and the platform trigger were left unchanged. The effect is that the record-book tonnage threshold now matches the Garbage Management Plan threshold at 100 GT, removing the old 100-to-400 GT band in which a ship carried a plan but only a logbook entry rather than a full Garbage Record Book. The United States Coast Guard implemented the change for vessels under its jurisdiction with a marine safety information bulletin keyed to the 1 May 2024 effective date. Any ship between 100 and 400 GT that traded internationally before 1 May 2024 with no formal record book was compliant then and is not compliant now.
A ship below the applicable tonnage threshold and not certified for 15 or more persons is not exempt from the discharge rules. It records discharges and accidental losses in the ship’s official logbook instead of a dedicated Garbage Record Book, but the recording duty does not disappear with the book. The book is a format requirement layered on top of a universal recording duty.
Part I and Part II: the MEPC.277(70) split
The Garbage Record Book has had two parts since the MEPC.277(70) amendments entered force on 1 March 2018. Before that date a single-part book mixed cargo residues in with general garbage. The split gave cargo residues their own part because the regulatory test for cargo residues, the HME classification, is fixed before loading rather than judged at discharge, so it needs a separate, independently traceable record.
Part I records garbage other than cargo residues. It covers the nine general categories that the garbage categories, HME, cargo residues and e-waste article treats in full: Category A plastics, Category B food wastes, Category C domestic wastes, Category D cooking oil, Category E incinerator ashes, Category F operational wastes, Category G animal carcasses, Category H fishing gear, and Category I e-waste. Every ship that must keep a record book keeps Part I.
Part II records cargo residues from solid bulk cargoes and is required only on ships that carry such cargoes. It covers Category J, cargo residues not harmful to the marine environment (non-HME), and Category K, cargo residues that are harmful to the marine environment (HME). The HME or non-HME status comes from the shipper’s declaration in the cargo documentation, assessed against the HME criteria in section 3.2 of the 2012 Guidelines for the implementation of MARPOL Annex V (MEPC.219(63), as amended by MEPC.295(71)) and declared under section 4.2 of the IMSBC Code. A bulk carrier discharging non-HME hold washings at sea logs the operation in Part II; an HME residue can only be delivered ashore, and that delivery is logged in Part II as well. The seven discharge and handling operations the form captures range across both parts, with the A-to-K category codes giving the inspector and the officer a shared shorthand for what was discharged or landed.
What each entry records
Regulation 10.3 sets out which operations are recorded and what each entry must contain. A discharge to sea is recorded with the date, time, position of the ship (latitude and longitude), category of garbage, and estimated amount discharged. An incineration is recorded with the date, time, position at the start and end of the operation, category incinerated, and estimated amount. A discharge to a reception facility ashore or to another ship is recorded with the date, time, port or facility (or the receiving ship), category, and amount. An accidental loss or discharge under Regulation 7, including the accidental loss of fishing gear, is recorded with the date, time, position, category, amount, the reason for the loss, and reasonable precautions taken to prevent or minimize it, with an assessment of any significant threat posed by the lost gear.
Each operation is recorded promptly and signed by the officer in charge of that operation on the date it occurred. Each completed page is then signed by the master of the ship. The two-signature structure puts the operation-level accountability on the officer who ran it and the page-level accountability on the master, which is why a record book with officer signatures but unsigned pages, or signed pages with no underlying operation entries, reads as incomplete to an inspector.
Language and retention
Entries are made in at least English, French, or Spanish. Where the ship is entitled to fly the flag of a State that also requires entries in its own official language, that national-language version prevails in the event of a dispute or discrepancy. The retention rule is fixed: the Garbage Record Book, together with the receipts obtained from port reception facilities, is kept on board the ship or platform in a place readily available for inspection at all reasonable times, and is preserved for at least two years from the date of the last entry. The reception receipts are part of the retention duty, not a separate courtesy. They are the document an inspector uses to test a landed-quantity entry against an independent record.
The 2018 amendments and the later electronic-record-book framework let a flag administration approve an electronic Garbage Record Book in place of the paper book, under the conditions in Resolution MEPC.312(74). An approved electronic book carries the same recording, signing (by electronic means), language, and two-year retention duties as the paper form. The medium changes; the content and the retention period do not.
Waiver for short voyages
Regulation 10.4 lets the Administration waive the Garbage Record Book requirement for ships engaged on voyages of one hour or less in duration, and for fixed or floating platforms, where the practicalities make a full book disproportionate. The waiver is an Administration decision, not a master’s election, and it does not waive the underlying discharge rules or the placard and plan duties. It recognizes that a harbor ferry on a continuous string of sub-one-hour legs would otherwise be writing record-book entries faster than it could carry passengers, while still leaving the operator inside the Regulation 3 to 7 discharge regime.
Port State control under Regulation 10
The inspection power
Regulation 10.5 gives the competent authority of the government of a Party the power to inspect the Garbage Record Book on board any ship to which Regulation 10 applies, while that ship is in the Party’s ports or offshore terminals. The officer may make a copy of any entry in the book and may require the master to certify that the copy is a true copy. Any copy so certified is admissible in judicial proceedings as evidence of the facts stated in the entry. The inspection must be done as quickly as possible and without causing the ship to be unduly delayed. That last clause is the same proportionality limit that runs through the rest of MARPOL port State control: the right to inspect does not carry a right to detain a ship longer than the inspection needs.
Regulation 10 inspection runs alongside the broader operational-requirements power in Regulation 9 of the Annex and the general port State control regime under the regional memoranda, the Paris MoU and the Tokyo MoU. An Annex V inspection typically pairs the documentary check (placard present and current, plan present and flag-approved, record book complete and consistent) with a physical and operational check (the garbage room, the segregation, the equipment, and a crew interview). The documents and the operation have to agree. A record book that shows steady food-waste discharges at sea on a route that ran entirely through a special area, or quantities that no voyage of that length could plausibly produce, gives the inspector grounds to look harder.
Common deficiencies and consequences
The Annex V deficiencies that PSC cites most often under or adjacent to Regulation 10 are documentary and operational at once. A Garbage Record Book with entries inconsistent with the actual operations (implausible quantities, discharge positions plotting inside prohibited areas, gaps where a discharge or landing clearly happened) is the headline category. A Garbage Management Plan that is outdated, that does not reflect the current ship configuration, or that names a person in charge who is no longer aboard is a second. A placard that is missing, illegible, or quotes superseded distances is a third. Non-functional handling equipment (an incinerator, compactor, or shredder logged as in use but actually broken) and incomplete segregation in the garbage room round out the list. Serious or repeated findings can move from a deficiency to a detention.
The enforcement exposure behind these deficiencies is substantial where a flag or port State pursues a falsified record. In the United States the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS) makes a false or incomplete Oil Record Book or Garbage Record Book a federal offence, and the largest MARPOL penalties on record have turned on falsified records rather than the underlying discharge alone. The record book is therefore not only a compliance document; it is the instrument on which the heaviest enforcement actions are built, which is why the prompt-entry and two-signature discipline in Regulation 10.3 carries real weight.
The inspection also tests the language rule. An English, French, or Spanish entry satisfies Regulation 10.3 on its face, but an inspector who cannot read the working-language placard, or who finds the placard and the record book describing different discharge limits, has a documentary inconsistency to pursue. The three accepted record-book languages were chosen so the entries are legible to the widest set of port authorities; the placard’s separate working-language layer exists for the crew. When the two layers conflict, the conflict itself is the finding. This is why managers fit a single multilingual placard and standardize record-book entries in one of the three accepted languages from the first voyage rather than leaving the choice to each officer of the watch.
A further check that surfaces in practice is the match between the Garbage Management Plan’s named person in charge and the ship’s actual organization. The plan names a position; the crew list names the holder. An inspector who reads the plan, asks for that person, and finds the rank filled and the holder able to walk through the segregation and recording procedure has confirmed the system end to end. The plan, the placard, and the record book are then mutually consistent, and the inspection closes on the documentary axis without a deficiency. The whole of Regulation 10 is built so that this end-to-end check is possible from the documents and a short interview, without the inspector needing to witness a discharge.
How the three documents work together
The three duties under Regulation 10 form one chain. The placard states the rule to the crew at the point of use; the Garbage Management Plan turns the rule into ship-specific procedures with a named owner; the Garbage Record Book proves the procedures were followed and gives the inspector something to test. Remove any link and the other two lose their value. A plan without a record book leaves no evidence trail. A record book without a plan has no procedure behind the entries. A placard without either leaves the crew with a rule and no system. The Annex V hub article at MARPOL Annex V and the garbage discharge rules article cover the discharge regime that these three documents serve; Regulation 10 is the layer that makes that regime auditable.
The chain also explains why Regulation 10 references the other regulations by number rather than restating them. The placard summarizes Regulations 3, 4, 5, and 6. The plan describes how the ship will stay inside those regulations. The record book captures the operations that those regulations govern. When any one of the three drifts out of step with the current discharge rules (a placard with the pre-2013 distances, a plan built to the old single-part record book, a record book without the Part I or Part II structure), the failure is a Regulation 10 failure measured against the Regulation 3 to 7 baseline, not a fresh breach of a standalone rule.
Platforms and offshore units
Fixed and floating platforms sit inside all three Regulation 10 duties, and they sit there regardless of tonnage. A platform displays the placards under Regulation 10.1, carries a Garbage Management Plan under Regulation 10.2, and keeps a Garbage Record Book under Regulation 10.3. The platform-specific discharge rules in Regulation 5 are what the platform’s placard summarizes and its records document. Regulation 5 is stricter than the rules for ships at sea: a platform engaged in exploration, exploitation, and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources, and any ship within 500 metres of such a platform, may only discharge food wastes that have been comminuted to pass a 25-millimetre screen, and only when the platform is more than 12 nautical miles from the nearest land, with all other garbage delivered ashore.
The platform record book therefore reads against a different discharge baseline than a merchant ship’s, even though the format and the Part I and Part II structure are the same. The short-voyage waiver in Regulation 10.4 can also reach a platform, recognizing that a fixed installation does not make “voyages” in the way a trading ship does. As with ships, the waiver touches only the dedicated record book, not the discharge rules in Regulation 5 or the placard and plan duties.
Worked compliance picture
Consider a 6,800 GT general cargo ship trading from a European port to a West African port, certified for a crew of 18. It crosses every Regulation 10 threshold: over 12 metres for the placard, over 100 GT and carrying more than 15 persons for the plan, and over the 100 GT record-book threshold (it was already over 400 GT before the MEPC.360(79) change). It must display multilingual placards at the galley, garbage room, and deck disposal points in the crew’s working language plus one of English, French, or Spanish, showing the Regulation 4 distances and the absolute prohibitions. It carries a flag-approved Garbage Management Plan to the MEPC.220(63) format that names the chief officer as person in charge of general garbage and the chief engineer for the incinerator and machinery-space waste. It keeps a Garbage Record Book with Part I, recording each food-waste discharge at sea (date, time, position, Category B, estimated amount, officer’s signature), each incineration (Category E ash to follow its own discharge limits), and each landing of plastics, cooking oil, and operational waste ashore against a reception-facility receipt. If the same ship loaded a non-HME solid bulk cargo on a later voyage, it would open Part II and log the hold-washing discharge of Category J residue separately. The master signs each completed page; the book and the receipts stay on board for at least two years.
Now shrink the ship. A 140 GT coastal feeder certified for a crew of seven, trading between two ports in different States, sat in an awkward band before 1 May 2024. It carried a Garbage Management Plan (over 100 GT) and a placard (over 12 metres) but, under the pre-amendment Regulation 10.3, it was below the 400 GT record-book threshold and not certified for 15 persons, so it recorded garbage in the ship’s official logbook rather than a Garbage Record Book. After MEPC.360(79) took effect on 1 May 2024, the same ship crossed the new 100 GT record-book threshold and must now keep a full Garbage Record Book. Nothing about its trade changed; the threshold moved under it.
Finally, a 9-metre, 8 GT pilot boat certified for four. It is below the placard length threshold, below the plan tonnage threshold, and below the record-book threshold, and is not certified for 15 persons. It carries none of the three Regulation 10 documents. It is still bound by the discharge prohibitions in Regulations 3 to 7, and any garbage discharge or accidental loss is recorded in its logbook, but Regulation 10’s documentary apparatus does not reach it.
Relationship to the other Annex V regulations
Regulation 10 is the documentary mirror of the operational regulations. The placard is the field summary of Regulation 4 (outside special areas), Regulation 6 (inside special areas), and Regulation 5 (platforms), with the Polar Code overlay where it applies. The Garbage Management Plan is the procedural translation of those same discharge rules into ship-specific practice. The Garbage Record Book is the evidence that the practice matched the rules, with Regulation 7’s exceptions for safety, accidental damage, and accidental gear loss handled by the dedicated accidental-loss entry. Reading Regulation 10 without the discharge regulations leaves the documents floating free of the rules they exist to capture, which is why a compliance review starts from the discharge rules and works outward to the placard, plan, and book rather than the other way around.
The category system that the placard summarizes and the record book records is the connective tissue. The A-to-K codes appear on the placard, in the plan’s segregation procedures, and in the record book’s Part I and Part II entries. An officer who can map a given waste stream to its category code, and the inspector who reads the same code in the book, are using the shared vocabulary that the MEPC.277(70) amendments fixed in 2018. The full treatment of those categories, including the HME assessment that decides Category J against Category K, lives in the garbage categories, HME, cargo residues and e-waste article; Regulation 10 assumes that vocabulary and builds the recording duty on top of it.
Currency and the instruments that govern
The Regulation 10 text in force today is the 2011 revised Annex V (MEPC.201(62), in force 1 January 2013) as amended by MEPC.277(70) (in force 1 March 2018) and MEPC.360(79) (in force 1 May 2024). The supporting guidance is the 2012 Guidelines for the development of garbage management plans (MEPC.220(63), adopted 2 March 2012) for the plan format, and the 2017 Guidelines for the implementation of MARPOL Annex V (MEPC.295(71), adopted 7 July 2017) for the wider compliance picture, which consolidates the Annex text reflecting MEPC.277(70). A ship’s documents have to track these instruments: a placard built to the pre-2013 distances, a plan built to the pre-2012 guidelines, or a single-part record book in service after 1 March 2018 are each out of currency. The safest reference for a discharge or a deficiency decision is the current consolidated Annex V text and the ship’s own approved Garbage Management Plan, read together, not a reference article.
Limitations
This article summarizes Regulation 10 of the revised MARPOL Annex V as a reference for practitioners. It is not the regulation. Where this summary and the consolidated Annex V text differ, the consolidated text governs, and a master or compliance officer makes discharge and recording decisions from the current Annex and the ship’s flag-approved Garbage Management Plan, not from a wiki article.
The tonnage threshold for the Garbage Record Book is the live example of why currency matters. The brief instruments for this article, MEPC.201(62) consolidated with MEPC.277(70), set that threshold at 400 gross tonnage, and that figure is correct for that consolidation. Resolution MEPC.360(79), in force 1 May 2024, lowered it to 100 gross tonnage. A reader relying on a copy of the Annex that predates the 2024 amendment will see 400 GT; a reader relying on a copy that postdates it will see 100 GT. Both are accurate to their text. Confirm the threshold against a copy of the Annex current to the date of the operation in question, and against the flag State’s transposition, before relying on it.
The paragraph numbering inside Regulation 10 also varies between the official IMO text and secondary reproductions. This article uses Regulation 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 for the placard, plan, and record-book duties, mapping onto the IMO paragraphs 1, 2, and 3. A formal deficiency report, flag-State submission, or legal filing should cite the paragraph exactly as the consolidated IMO Annex numbers it. The electronic Garbage Record Book option under MEPC.312(74) depends on the flag administration’s approval; a ship may not switch to an electronic book without that approval, and an unapproved electronic book is treated as no book.
See also
- MARPOL Annex V: Garbage from Ships the Annex V hub
- MARPOL Annex V: Garbage discharge rules
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 4: Discharge outside special areas
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 5: Platforms
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 6: Discharge within special areas
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 7: Exceptions
- Garbage categories, HME, cargo residues and e-waste
- Port State control
- Paris MoU
- Tokyo MoU
- Polar Code
- MARPOL Convention
References
- IMO Resolution MEPC.201(62) (adopted 15 July 2011), 2011 revised MARPOL Annex V; in force 1 January 2013. Regulation 10: Placards, garbage management plans and garbage record-keeping.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.277(70) (adopted 28 October 2016), Amendments to MARPOL Annex V; in force 1 March 2018. Garbage Record Book Part I / Part II split; e-waste category; HME treatment of solid bulk cargo residues.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.360(79) (adopted 16 December 2022), Amendments to MARPOL Annex V; in force 1 May 2024. Lowered the Garbage Record Book tonnage threshold in Regulation 10 from 400 GT to 100 GT.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.220(63) (adopted 2 March 2012), 2012 Guidelines for the development of garbage management plans, for compliance with Regulation 10 of the revised MARPOL Annex V.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.295(71) (adopted 7 July 2017), 2017 Guidelines for the implementation of MARPOL Annex V.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.312(74) (adopted 17 May 2019), 2019 Guidelines for the use of electronic record books under MARPOL.
- Polar Code Part II-A (Resolution MEPC.264(68) and MSC.385(94)), in force 1 January 2017, section 5.2 garbage.