Cheltenham Supply Corp. v. United States

63 Cust. Ct. 271, 306 F. Supp. 472, 1969 Cust. Ct. LEXIS 3757
CourtUnited States Customs Court
DecidedOctober 27, 1969
DocketC.D. 3908
StatusPublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 63 Cust. Ct. 271 (Cheltenham Supply Corp. v. United States) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering United States Customs Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Cheltenham Supply Corp. v. United States, 63 Cust. Ct. 271, 306 F. Supp. 472, 1969 Cust. Ct. LEXIS 3757 (cusc 1969).

Opinion

Re, Judge:

The plaintiff has brought this action to recover a portion of duties paid upon the importation of certain merchandise described on the invoice as “transparent cellulose film”. It was described in the Special Customs Invoice as “Cellophane in rolls substandard”, and was classified under the provisions of item 774.60 of the Tariff Schedules of the United States as other “Articles, not specially provided for, of rubber or plastics”, dutiable at 17 per centum ad valorem.

Plaintiff’s primary claim is that the merchandise should have been classified as “Waste and scrap, of rubber or plastics, fit only for remanufacture”, under item 771.15 of the Tariff Schedules of the United States, with duty at 4 per centum ad valorem. Alternatively, plaintiff claims that the merchandise was properly classifiable under item 793.00 of the Tariff Schedules of the United States, which provides for “Waste and scrap not specially provided for”, with a rate of duty at 4 per centum ad valorem.

The following are the pertinent or competing items of the Tariff Schedules of the United States:

“Schedule 7, Part 12, Subpart D:
Articles not specially provided for, of rubber or plastics:
* * * * $ * $
774.60 Other_ 17% ad val.
Schedule 7, Part 12, Subpart B:
Waste and scrap, of rubber or plastics, fit only for remanufacture:
*******
771.15 Other- 4% ad val.
[273]*273Schedule 7, Part 13, Subpart D:
793.00 Waste and scrap not specially provided for - 4% ad val.”

" The merchandise in question was manufactured for use as “anchor coated freezing film”, for the packaging of foods which are to be frozen. Because of one or more mechanically or chemically caused defects, it could not be used for the original purpose intended and was sold to the plaintiff as “waste material”. The question presented is whether the merchandise is “waste” in the tariff sense of the word, and is classifiable under either of the quoted provisions of the Tariff Schedules of the United States pertaining to “waste”.

In addition to the official papers, the record in this case consists of the testimony of one witness called by the plaintiff, and three sample rolls of cellophane film. Although the sample rolls were not from the importation in litigation, they were imported by the plaintiff from the same supplier of the merchandise under protest and illustrated some of the many defects of that merchandise.

Mr. Edward Berger, president and general supervisor of the plaintiff corporation, testified that plaintiff’s “basic business is buying waste products and developing them into a saleable and usable product”, specializing and dealing “exclusively in all of the various types of cellophane.” He testified that plaintiff handled all types of “regenerated cellulose film, commonly known as cellophane”, and imported [i]n excess of two million pounds a year.”

Mr. Berger explained that there are fifty or sixty different types of cellophane with variations of weight, coating and thickness, and that it can be produced with certain characteristics which will dedicate it for a particular use. The merchandise covered by the protest was to be used for packaging foods that were to be frozen. Mr. Berger testified that as a result of various defects it was “thrown out from normal production” and was sold to the plaintiff as waste. Stating that “[tjhere are probably 40 different reasons” why the controverted merchandise is “waste material” or “waste”, Mr. Berger enumerated some of the specific defects as follows:

“This particular lot of cellophane had anywhere from 20 to 25 different defects in different rolls. Each roll doesn’t have all of these defects but each roll has one or more of the defects such as bad color, odor, inability to seal, bad transparency, being cloudy, bad moistureproofness which will allow moisture to transfer through the paper, which is no good, bad rolling, underwound, overcut, many, many splices within one given roll which will not allow it to run on a machine.” (R. 10-11)

As a consequence of the various defects, Mr. Berger testified that the merchandise could not be used on high speed automatic machinery as [274]*274originally intended. Additionally, lie testified that prior to plaintiff’s purchase of the merchandise, the manufacturer disposed of it iu the most inexpensive manner: “They burned it, dumped it, and [did] whatever they had to do to just get rid of it.”

In customs law the term “waste” is a word of art with a meaning that has been developed by the courts in a series of cases covering a wide variety of merchandise.

After an examination of several definitions, the Supreme Court of the United States has stated that:

“* * * The prominent characteristic running through all these definitions is that of refuse, or material that is not susceptible of being used for the ordinary purposes of manufacture. It does not presuppose that the article is absolutely worthless, but that it is unmerchantable and used for purposes for which merchantable material of the same class is unsuitable.” Patton v. United States, 159 U.S. 500, 503, 16 Sup. Ct. 89 (1895).

The Supreme Court in the Patton case concluded that, “[i]f the ordinary definition of ‘waste,’ as refuse matter thrown off in the process of manufacture, is to control, it is quite clear that the importations in question are not susceptible of this meaning.” Id. at 505.

Although the word, more recently, has acquired a more specific and sharper meaning, the .essential characteristics set forth by the Supreme Court have continued. For example, the Court of Customs Appeals (now the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals) in the case of United States v. Salomon, 1 Ct. Cust. Appls. 246, 250-251, T.D. 31277 (1911), gave the following description:

“* * * Waste ordinarily implies superfluous, useless or rejected material, something left over, as the refuse of cotton manufacture. Let it not be understood that we mean to hold that Congress has used the word waste in the tariff act as meaning that which has no value — worthless remnants — but that waste is something which is, generally speaking, left over in the treatment of the material, once obtained, as contradistinguished from the treatment to obtain the material itself.”

Perhaps the most helpful judicial expression of the tariff meaning of the term is found in Harley Co. v. United States, 14 Ct. Cust. Appls. 112, 115, T.D. 41644 (1926), where the Court of Customs Appeals stated:

“In the tariff sense, waste is a term which includes manufactured articles which have become useless for the original purpose for which they were made and fit only for remanufacture into something else. It also includes refuse, surplus, and useless stuff resulting from manufacture or from manufacturing processes and commercially unfit, without remanufacture, for the purposes for which the original material was suitable and from which material such refuse, surplus, or unsought residuum was derived. The latter [275]

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Bluebook (online)
63 Cust. Ct. 271, 306 F. Supp. 472, 1969 Cust. Ct. LEXIS 3757, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/cheltenham-supply-corp-v-united-states-cusc-1969.