Bitumen Supply to the Philippines

The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,641 islands, the figure published by the national mapping authority after its survey update, revised upward from the 7,107 that appeared in older references. Roughly two thousand of them are inhabited on the commonly cited count. The land area is around 300,000 km², split across three island groups — Luzon in the north, the Visayas in the centre and Mindanao in the south — and it is distributed along a coastline commonly described as one of the longest of any country on earth. The largest islands after Luzon and Mindanao are Samar, Negros, Palawan, Panay, Mindoro, Leyte, Cebu, Bohol and Masbate, and every one of them carries road projects that a binder supplier can be asked to quote.

The commercial consequence is blunt and it is the reason this page exists. There is no such thing as delivery to the Philippines. There is delivery to a named place on a named island, reached by a named sequence of sea legs, and the named place decides the packing, the unit weight, the Incoterms rule, the insurance, the container arrangement, the lead time and the exposure to weather. A supplier who prices a Philippine enquiry from the country name is pricing something they have not been told.

The shape of every Philippine consignment

With the exception of projects sitting close to a gateway port, a Philippine bitumen consignment has two legs and two contracts of carriage.

• The international leg. An ocean voyage to a gateway port: the Port of Manila, Batangas or Subic on Luzon; Cebu or Iloilo in the Visayas; Davao, Cagayan de Oro or General Santos on Mindanao. This is the leg a bill of lading covers and the leg an Incoterms sea rule describes.
• The domestic inter-island leg. A second movement from the gateway to the island the work is on, on a domestic vessel under a domestic bill of lading, with its own carrier, its own port charges at both ends, its own free time and its own weather exposure. No marine bill of lading covers it and no sea Incoterms rule describes it.

Occasionally there is a third leg, because the project is not at the island's port but inland of it, on a provincial road that may run over bridges with posted load restrictions. That is a haulage question, but it belongs in the same conversation, because it decides the unit weight of the packing more often than the sea legs do.

Where an enquiry usually stops, and where it has to go

A typical first message reads: one thousand metric tonnes of bitumen to the Philippines, please quote CFR. Three facts are missing and none of them is optional.

• Which island and which town. Not the region, not the province headquarters, the actual site. A project on Catanduanes, on Siargao, on Tawi-Tawi, on Camiguin, on Marinduque or on Palawan is a different transaction from one in Metro Manila, and they are different from each other.
• Which gateway port the cargo should be consigned to, and whether the consignee has a broker and an accreditation at that port. Clearance is not portable: a consignee set up to clear at Manila is not automatically set up to clear at Cagayan de Oro.
• Who arranges and pays for the inter-island leg, and at which point risk passes. This is the single most common gap in a Philippine offer, and it is not closed by the word CFR.

What changes the moment a second leg exists

Every one of the following is decided by the domestic leg rather than by the ocean leg, and every one of them is cheaper to settle in the contract than at a quay.

• Packing and unit weight. A 20 ft container handled by a gantry at a gateway terminal is one problem. Eighty drums landed at a provincial pier with a forklift and a mobile crane, or worked over the side into a barge, is a different one. The unit that survives is chosen from the equipment at the far end, not from the price per tonne of packaging.
• Risk transfer. Under a sea rule, risk passes on the international leg. Everything that then happens on the domestic leg — and it is the leg with the transhipments, the small berths and the weather cancellations — is already on the buyer.
• Insurance. A marine cargo policy written to the discharge port ends at the discharge port unless it has been deliberately extended over the domestic leg and the final haul. This is the most commonly missed line on a first Philippine shipment.
• Container free time and detention. A box that goes to an island and comes back is out of the line's system for far longer than a box emptied near the gateway. Free time is agreed at booking and cannot be recovered by argument afterwards.
• Lead time. Feeder and roll-on roll-off frequency on a minor route is not daily, and a missed sailing is not a missed hour.
• Weather. A tropical cyclone that never approaches your ocean vessel can still suspend domestic sailings and hold the cargo at the transhipment port until the backlog clears.
• Documents and charges. Two ports of loading and two ports of discharge means two sets of port authority dues and two sets of cargo handling charges, on top of a domestic bill of lading that a bank holding a marine bill has no security over.

The three modes the domestic leg actually uses

Buyers who have only shipped to mainland markets tend to assume the second leg is a smaller version of the first. It is not, and which of the three modes is used changes what the packing has to survive.

• Containerised domestic feeder. The box is transferred to a domestic vessel and lands at an island container berth. Cleanest option where it exists, and the one that keeps the cargo sealed. Its limit is that not every island port takes containers, and not every domestic operator will carry a line's box beyond the gateway without a separate arrangement.
• Roll-on roll-off. The cargo stays on a truck or trailer and the truck drives onto the vessel. This is the workhorse of Philippine domestic freight and it is why a parcel of drums is often stripped out of the container at the gateway and reloaded onto a flatbed for the rest of the journey. It removes the container detention problem entirely and adds a road leg at each end.
• Barge, lighter and breakbulk. At many minor and municipal ports the vessel does not come alongside a container berth at all: cargo is worked over the side into a barge, or landed at a small pier by ship's gear. This is where a drum earns its cost, and where a one-tonne bag or a tank container is often simply not landable.

The land network is not continuous, and the highway numbering admits it

The Pan-Philippine Highway, universally called the Maharlika Highway and carried on the Asian Highway network as AH26, runs from the far north of Luzon to Mindanao over a distance commonly cited at around 3,500 km. It is a single numbered route and it is not a continuous road: it uses ferry crossings, notably between the southern tip of Luzon and Samar across the San Bernardino Strait, and between Leyte and Mindanao across the Surigao Strait, with the Samar to Leyte link carried by the San Juanico Bridge. The wider roll-on roll-off network built around it, the Philippine Nautical Highway System in its western, central and eastern routes, exists precisely so that a loaded truck can cross the archipelago without the cargo being handled at each island.

Two practical points follow. First, a delivery quoted as an overland haul from Manila to a Mindanao town is not an overland haul; it contains sea crossings, and those crossings stop when the Coast Guard stops sailings. Second, inter-island bridges and provincial spans carry posted load limits that are revised from time to time following inspection, so a lorry weight that is legal on the national arterial is not automatically legal on the last twenty kilometres. Confirm the routing and the permissible gross weight with the haulier for the week of delivery rather than treating either as a fixed fact.

What this page does not tell you

It states no transit time, freight rate, vehicle payload, vessel capacity, berth draught, port throughput, container free time, detention charge, duty rate, tax rate or excise rate, and it names no shipping line, terminal operator, cargo handling operator, broker, inspection body, refinery or client as a counterparty. It does not claim any presence, office, agency or shipping history in the Philippines. Ports, corridors and ferry crossings are described because geography is stable and publicly checkable; operating status is not, it changes, and it belongs to the freight forwarder who is accountable for it. It states no position on whether any product is currently within the scope of any Philippine product certification or import clearance scheme, for the reason set out in the clearance section. And it is not customs, tax, regulatory or legal advice.

Public works in the Philippines are procured against the DPWH Standard Specifications for Public Works and Highways, known throughout the industry as the Blue Book. Volume II is the highways, bridges and airports volume and is the one a binder supplier needs to know; other volumes in the series cover other classes of public works. It is issued by the Department of Public Works and Highways, and it is amended between editions by Department Order. The first question to put to any Philippine buyer is therefore not the tonnage but which edition of the Blue Book, and which subsequent department orders, the project is written against.

The Blue Book does not write its own binder chemistry. It adopts AASHTO material standards by reference. That single structural fact is the whole commercial difference between the Philippines and most of the markets around it, and it is why a supplier working from a European technical data sheet is answering a question nobody asked.

The clauses that actually name the binder

• Item 702, Bituminous Materials — the materials clause, and the one that matters. Asphalt cement, cutback asphalt and emulsified asphalt are each specified here by reference to an AASHTO M-number.
• Item 310, Bituminous Concrete Surface Course, Hot-Laid — the principal asphalt concrete pay item. It calls the binder up through Item 702 and sets the aggregate grading and the mix design criteria.
• Item 301, Bituminous Prime Coat — medium-curing cutback asphalt, the MC grades, applied to a prepared granular base. MC-70 and MC-30 are the grades most often seen against it.
• Item 302, Bituminous Tack Coat — emulsified asphalt or asphalt cement, depending on what the clause permits for that project.
• Items 303 to 306 — seal coats, bituminous surface treatment, penetration macadam and road-mix work, all drawing their materials from the same Item 702.

When an enquiry says only “asphalt for a DPWH project”, the useful reply is a question rather than a price: which pay item, and which grade does the Item 702 clause name for it. A prime coat and a wearing course binder are not the same product and are not even the same class of product. Quoting paving bitumen against a prime coat line item wastes a week for both sides.

How the specification is amended, and why the edition matters

Three layers sit on top of each other in a Philippine bid package, and only the top layer binds.

• The Blue Book itself, in the edition the project incorporates. Editions are dated and they are not identical, so a clause quoted from an older printing may not be the clause the engineer is holding.
• Department Orders, which amend, supersede or add to standard items between editions. A department order can change a material requirement without a new edition being printed, which is why “the Blue Book says” is not a complete answer to anything.
• The project's own Special Provisions and Technical Specifications, which are drafted for the individual contract and override the standard clause where they differ. This is where a performance-graded binder, an anti-stripping additive requirement, a modified binder, a tightened acceptance window or a non-standard test schedule normally appears.

The instruction that follows is simple and it saves more time than anything else on this page: ask for the bid documents' bituminous clauses, not for the Blue Book reference. A serious buyer will send them. A buyer who cannot produce them has not yet been awarded the work, which is itself useful information about the enquiry.

The national standards body, and what it is not

The Philippine national standards body is the Bureau of Philippine Standards, under the Department of Trade and Industry. It is the body that develops and adopts Philippine National Standards, operates the PS licence for locally manufactured products under mandatory certification, and issues the Import Commodity Clearance for imported products within that same mandatory scope. Older references, including the earlier version of this page, call it the Bureau of Product Standards; that was its former name and the reference has been corrected here.

What matters commercially is the boundary. The Bureau of Philippine Standards is not the road specification authority. Its scheme governs whether goods may be placed on the Philippine market at all; the Blue Book governs whether a delivered material will be accepted into a construction contract. A supplier can satisfy one and fail the other. Treat them as two separate questions, put the market-access question to a licensed customs broker and the acceptance question to the project's Materials Engineer, and do not let an answer from one be offered as an answer to the other.

Which grade, and why

Binder selection in the Philippines is driven by two things that are true across the whole archipelago and by one that is not.

The first is temperature. Nowhere in the Philippines freezes. Mean temperatures sit in the high twenties Celsius year round in the lowlands and pavement surface temperatures in the middle of a dry-season afternoon are high. Low-temperature cracking, the failure mode that governs binder choice in northern China, northern Vietnam or the Caucasus, is simply not a Philippine design case. What governs instead is permanent deformation: rutting and shoving under heavy, slow-moving truck traffic on port approaches, provincial arterials and urban corridors.

The second is water. Annual rainfall over much of the country runs from around 2,000 mm to well over 4,000 mm in the wettest zones. Moisture damage — stripping of the binder from the aggregate — is the dominant practical distress, not oxidative ageing. That is why adhesion and the mix's resistance to water matter as much as the grade number, why anti-stripping additive appears in many project specifications, and why a binder's solubility and cleanliness lines on the Certificate of Analysis are worth reading rather than skimming.

The third factor, the one that varies, is traffic loading, and it is what separates the grades in use. AASHTO M 20 penetration grades 85-100 and 60-70 are the grades that appear in Philippine paving work. The softer 85-100 has long been the familiar workhorse and is easier to place and compact; 60-70 is the stiffer, more rut-resistant choice where loading is heavy or the pavement runs through a hot, dry corridor. Both are legitimate M 20 grades, which is exactly why the grade number has to come from the project's own Item 702 clause and not from a supplier's assumption. Do not offer one and hope the engineer accepts it as the other.

The move toward performance grading

DPWH has been introducing performance-graded binders specified to AASHTO M 320 on selected work, in step with wider Superpave adoption across the region. If a project names a PG grade, one point is worth understanding before quoting.

In a country with no freezing season, the low-temperature half of a PG designation is not the governing constraint. A PG 64-10 or PG 70-10 covers the Philippine climate on the cold side comfortably, and grade selection is effectively one-sided: it is decided by the high-temperature designation, then bumped upward for slow or standing traffic. That makes a Philippine PG requirement look unusual to a supplier used to seeing a wide temperature spread on a North American or Central Asian specification. The arithmetic behind this is set out in full further down the page.

Confirm at the enquiry stage whether the project sits under M 20 or M 320, because the testing regimes share almost nothing. An M 20 grade is proved by penetration, flash point, ductility, solubility and the thin film oven test — and note that softening point is not itself an M 20 acceptance line, even though Philippine buyers routinely ask for it. An M 320 grade is proved by dynamic shear rheometer, rolling thin film oven, pressure ageing vessel and bending beam rheometer results. A Certificate of Analysis built for one will not satisfy the other, and the difference cannot be closed after loading.

Why an EN or IS grade is the wrong answer here

European penetration bands do not line up with AASHTO bands, and the way they fail to line up is the point. EN 12591 grade 70/100 is not AASHTO 85-100, and EN 50/70 is not AASHTO 60-70. In both pairs the European band is the wider one, so the AASHTO band sits inside it on penetration and the penetration line alone rarely blocks a substitution — but the containment runs one way and does not run back. What separates them is a property the AASHTO document does not control: EN 12591 sets a softening point band for every grade — 46 to 54 °C for 50/70 — while the penetration-grading standard sets no softening point limit at all. A cargo can therefore be a fully compliant AASHTO 60-70 and a failed EN 50/70 on a line nobody was asked to measure. These are different acceptance windows, not a rounding difference. And an engineer holding an Item 702 clause has no mechanism to accept a band that is not the band written in the specification, whatever the actual test result happens to be.

Indian viscosity grades are further away still. VG-10, VG-20, VG-30 and VG-40 are defined by absolute viscosity at 60 °C under IS 73, a standard the Blue Book does not reference at all. A VG-30 offer against a DPWH project is not a near miss; it is a different classification system with no route into the acceptance chain. The grade equivalence page sets out where the bands do and do not overlap, and the honest summary is that a cross-reference table is a basis for a conversation with an engineer and never a defence at delivery.

The practical instruction is straightforward. Offer the AASHTO grade the clause names, and have the laboratory report the results with the AASHTO T-numbers printed alongside the ASTM designations. The physics is identical; the paperwork is what gets signed.

Who signs the material off

DPWH quality assurance runs through an accredited Materials Engineer assigned to the project, supported by the DPWH Bureau of Research and Standards at central level and by the materials laboratories attached to the regional and district engineering offices. The structure splits responsibility in a way worth understanding: the contractor runs quality control on its own production, and the implementing office runs quality assurance on what is delivered and placed, with the specification setting minimum testing requirements expressed against quantity of material rather than leaving frequency to be negotiated between the parties.

Understand what this means commercially: a foreign Certificate of Analysis is supporting evidence, not acceptance. Delivered material is normally sampled and tested locally against the Item 702 limits before it is incorporated.

Three things follow, and the third is specific to an archipelago.

• The COA has to be batch-specific and honest, because a local retest will find a certificate that was copied from a specification range rather than from a test sheet.
• Sealed retained samples taken at the load port under third-party supervision and held by both parties are not a luxury on this route. They are the only defence available if a local laboratory result disagrees with the certificate after the cargo has already made two sea voyages. Sample to AASHTO T 40 or ASTM D140 and record the seal numbers.
• Retesting on an island project has a logistics tail of its own. A district office on a small island may not hold the full bituminous test suite, so a disputed sample travels to a regional laboratory by the same ferry network the cargo used. A retest is therefore not a same-day event, and a specification argument discovered at the island site can idle a paving crew for longer than the same argument would in Metro Manila. Settle the acceptance schedule before loading and put the agreed test list in the contract.

Who the buyer actually is

Philippine road procurement is more dispersed than a first-time supplier expects, and the counterparty determines which specification document is in play.

• DPWH for the national road network, executed through regional offices and a large number of district engineering offices spread across the country. This is the Blue Book in its purest form.
• Local government units — provinces, cities and municipalities — procuring their own roads under the Local Government Code. They commonly adopt the Blue Book by reference but their packages are smaller, more numerous and more geographically scattered.
• The Ministry of Public Works of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which procures public works within that region separately from DPWH. A Mindanao enquiry is not automatically a DPWH enquiry, and the implementing agency is worth establishing early because it decides whose accreditation and whose testing regime applies.
• Airport and port authorities and the transport department for aviation and maritime infrastructure. Internationally supervised airport pavement work sometimes cites an aviation specification rather than the Blue Book, which changes the binder requirement completely.
• Private and industrial work — plant yards, logistics hubs, mine and plantation roads, resort and subdivision development. Here the specification is whatever the client's engineer writes, and it is often the Blue Book anyway because that is what the local contractor knows.

Why there is less asphalt here than the road programme suggests

This is the market fact that most distinguishes the Philippines from its Southeast Asian neighbours and it deserves stating plainly. A very large share of the Philippine national road network is built in Portland cement concrete pavement, procured under the Blue Book's concrete pavement item rather than its bituminous items. Concrete has been the default for much new national road construction for a long time, for reasons that include durability under heavy rainfall, resistance to the moisture damage discussed later on this page, and lower dependence on specialist plant and skilled maintenance in remote provinces.

For a binder supplier that has three consequences. First, the addressable market is not proportional to the size of the road programme: it sits in asphalt overlays on existing concrete and asphalt pavements, in urban and local roads, in airport and port pavements, and in private and industrial work. Second, parcel sizes are smaller and more dispersed than the national infrastructure headline implies, which reinforces everything the archipelago section says about packing and about the second sea leg. Third, overlay work brings its own technical question — reflective cracking through a bituminous overlay from the joints of the concrete beneath it — which is answered in the interlayer and the mix rather than in the binder grade, and which a supplier should not offer to solve with a harder or softer penetration number.

How the buyer is contracting

Government procurement operates under Republic Act 12009, the New Government Procurement Act, which replaced Republic Act 9184 in 2024, with opportunities posted through PhilGEPS. National roads are procured by DPWH; local roads are procured separately by local government units. For a binder supplier the practical consequence is that the counterparty is almost always a contractor who has bid a fixed unit price, not the agency.

That matters more here than it sounds. Contract price adjustment in Philippine public works is tightly constrained by the procurement law rather than being a routine commercial mechanism, so a contractor who has bid a unit price has very little room to absorb either a binder price move or a specification surprise. A contractor in that position has almost no tolerance for a specification argument discovered at the discharge port, and even less for one discovered on the island. Get the clause, quote the clause, and put the acceptance tests in the contract.

The low-temperature half of the specification is inert here

The performance grading system selects the low-temperature grade from a pavement design temperature computed from air temperature. The published low-temperature model estimates the pavement surface design temperature as 0.859 multiplied by the minimum air temperature, plus 1.7 °C. Put a Philippine lowland minimum air temperature into that model — anywhere in the low twenties Celsius, which is what the record actually shows for the great majority of inhabited sites — and the answer comes back as a positive number in the high teens Celsius.

Now look at what the standard offers. AASHTO M 320 low-temperature grades run −10, −16, −22, −28, −34, −40 and −46 °C. The warmest low grade the system contains is −10. The Philippines is therefore not merely at the mild end of the low-temperature scale; it is below the bottom rung of it, by roughly thirty degrees. There is no lower-specification option to select, because the specification does not go that way.

Three consequences follow, and they are commercially useful rather than academic.

• A Philippine PG designation is effectively a single number. PG 64-10, PG 70-10, PG 76-10: the second half is a constant, and it is a constant because the standard has no milder value to offer. Grade selection is an argument about the first number only.
• The bending beam rheometer is run at a temperature the pavement will never see. The low-temperature test is conducted at the low grade plus 10 °C, so for a −10 grade it is run at 0 °C. That is around twenty degrees below the coldest surface temperature a Philippine lowland pavement will ever experience. The test still has to be reported where the clause demands it, but nobody should imagine it is telling them something about how the road will behave.
• Do not buy a wide grade span you were not asked for. The arithmetic span between the two numbers is a strong clue to how a binder was made: a span of around 80 to 86 °C, as in PG 70-10 or PG 76-10, is within reach of a stiff straight-run binder, while a span approaching 98 °C, as in PG 76-22, is very hard to reach without polymer modification. A PG 76-22 offered against a Philippine clause that asked for PG 76-10 is a more expensive product answering a requirement the country does not have. If the clause says −22, quote −22; if it says −10, do not pay for −22.

So what decides the number that does matter

The high-temperature grade is selected under AASHTO M 323 from the pavement design temperature computed at 20 mm below the surface from the seven-day average maximum air temperature at the site, adjusted for latitude and for the reliability level the agency chooses. Run that procedure with Philippine lowland data and the climatic grade lands in the PG 58 to PG 64 region depending on the site and the reliability level selected.

That immediately explains something that puzzles suppliers: if the climatic grade is PG 58 or PG 64, why do Philippine specifications name PG 70 and PG 76? Because the specified grade is the climatic grade after the traffic adjustment, and M 323 sets that adjustment out explicitly:

• Increase the high-temperature grade by one grade — 6 °C — for slow transient loads.
• Increase it by two grades — 12 °C — for standing loads.
• Consider a one-grade increase where design traffic reaches or exceeds 30 million equivalent single axle loads.

So a PG 76-10 on a Philippine project is normally a PG 64 climate with a two-grade standing-load bump on it, not a claim that the pavement reaches 76 °C. Understanding that changes the conversation with the engineer, because it identifies exactly which locations need the higher grade and which do not.

The Philippine standing and slow-load cases are specific and they are worth listing, because they are where the money should go:

• Port gates, container yards and terminal hardstanding at the gateway ports, where laden trailers queue and stand.
• Urban intersections and their approaches, where heavy traffic decelerates, stops and pulls away on the same square metres all day.
• Bus and jeepney stops and terminal aprons, which are the most concentrated standing-load case in Philippine urban pavement and are frequently overlooked in the binder decision.
• Toll plazas and weighbridges.
• Market streets and provincial town centres with dense slow traffic, tricycle stands and loading bays.
• Industrial and plantation yards, where the load is heavy and the speed is near zero.

Everywhere else — free-flowing provincial arterial, rural road, light-traffic overlay — the traffic bump is not justified and specifying it anyway raises the price and makes the mix harder to place and compact in a climate that does not need the stiffness.

Where a project is written to AASHTO M 332 instead, the mechanism is different but the logic is the same. The binder stays at the climatic grade and the traffic case is handled by tightening the non-recoverable creep compliance limit according to a designation of S, H, V or E — standard, heavy, very heavy or extremely heavy. Read the letter as a traffic statement, never as a temperature statement. The performance grading guide sets out both systems in full.

The same argument in penetration language

Most Philippine work is still specified in the penetration idiom, and the argument translates directly. Because temperature is effectively constant across the lowland archipelago, the choice between 85-100 and 60-70 is a traffic decision, not a climate decision. That is unusual. In most markets the grade argument is geographic; here it is about what drives over the pavement.

Two refinements matter more here than they would elsewhere.

First, softening point is the number to think with, even though it is not an M 20 acceptance line. In a country with no cold season, ring and ball softening point to AASHTO T 53 is the closest single indicator on a routine certificate of how the binder will behave at service temperature. Ask for the measured value and read it as hard as you read penetration.

Second, the band is not a point. A 61 dmm cargo and a 69 dmm cargo are both genuine 60-70 and both pass a conformity check, and on a hot slow-traffic corridor they are not the same material. Where the design case is tight, agree a narrower contractual window in writing. This keeps the Item 702 clause satisfied while giving you a contractual right to the material you actually specified, and it costs nothing to write down before loading.

Moisture is the other half, and it is not a binder property

If the low-temperature side of the specification is inert, the water side is doing double duty. With annual rainfall over much of the country between 2,000 mm and well over 4,000 mm, and with two of the four climate types having no dry season at all, moisture damage is the dominant practical distress on Philippine bituminous pavement.

The mechanism is worth stating precisely because it explains why a binder certificate cannot answer it. Water works its way into the mix through voids and cracks, reaches the interface between the binder film and the aggregate surface, and displaces the binder from the stone. The bond fails; the aggregate is stripped; the mix loses cohesion from the bottom of the layer upward and appears at the surface as ravelling, potholing and rapid loss of the wearing course. The property that fails is the affinity between a particular binder and a particular aggregate. It is a property of the pair. It cannot be measured on a binder sample alone and it cannot be certified by a supplier who has never seen the aggregate.

The tests that do answer it are mix-level tests:

• AASHTO T 283, resistance of compacted asphalt mixtures to moisture-induced damage, which conditions specimens by saturation and produces a tensile strength ratio. AASHTO M 323 sets a minimum tensile strength ratio of 80 % by this method, which is the one substantiable acceptance figure in this whole area. Where a Philippine Special Provision imposes a moisture requirement, this is usually the test behind it.
• ASTM D3625, the boiling water test, which assesses retained coating visually. Crude, cheap, fast and runnable at a site laboratory, which makes it the practical screening tool on a remote project. The acceptance figure comes from the project clause, not from the method.
• AASHTO T 182, coating and stripping of bitumen-aggregate mixtures, the other quick affinity screen.
• AASHTO T 165 and T 167, the immersion-compression route, where a clause controls retained strength rather than tensile strength ratio.

Why the aggregate question is genuinely Philippine

Aggregate sources here vary more than in most markets and the variation runs in both directions.

• Much of the country sits on volcanic geology, so andesite and basalt are widely available. Basic volcanic rock generally has good affinity for bitumen and is the friendly case.
• Small and coralline islands frequently work coralline limestone. Calcareous aggregate also bonds well, but it is soft, it degrades under the crusher and under traffic, and its dust content is a real mix-design problem.
• River-run gravels with siliceous coatings, and crusher fines carrying clay or silt, are the unfriendly case, and they are common wherever a project sources locally to avoid a barge movement. Acidic and dirty aggregate strips.
• Parts of central Luzon work volcanic ash and lahar deposits as construction material, which is a legitimate and abundant source with its own gradation and absorption behaviour that has to be designed for rather than assumed.

The single decision rule that comes out of this: on an island project, the aggregate is almost always local, because barging aggregate is prohibitive. So the moisture question has to be answered with the project's own aggregate, before the binder is fixed. Commission the affinity screen and the T 283 series with the actual quarry material at the design stage. Doing it afterwards means doing it on a pavement.

Anti-stripping additives, and where they should be dosed

Where the affinity result is marginal, the two established answers are a liquid anti-stripping agent, normally an amine-based surfactant dosed into the binder, or hydrated lime added to the aggregate. Common industry practice puts liquid additive dosage in the region of 0.2 to 0.5 % by mass of binder, and hydrated lime in the region of 1 to 1.5 % by mass of aggregate. Both of those ranges are common practice and not standard requirements; the binding figure is whatever the project's mix design and Special Provisions establish, verified by re-running the moisture test on the treated mix rather than assumed from the dosage.

One decision on this is specific to an island route and is worth taking deliberately. Where the additive is dosed changes what you are shipping. A binder dosed with a liquid anti-stripping agent at the loading terminal is a treated product that then spends an ocean voyage, a transhipment, a domestic sea leg and possibly weeks of yard storage before it reaches the plant; some additives lose effectiveness with prolonged heat exposure. Dosing at the asphalt plant, in line, keeps the treatment fresh and keeps the responsibility with the party that owns the mix design. Where a buyer wants pre-dosed binder, agree the additive, the dosage, the ageing behaviour and the retest obligation in writing, and do not let it become an implied warranty of moisture performance that a binder supplier cannot give. The adhesion and anti-stripping page covers the chemistry in detail.

Choosing the grade: the shape of the answer

These are directions of travel for a conversation with the Materials Engineer, not a substitute for the Item 702 clause and its Special Provisions.

• Bitumen 85-100. The familiar Philippine workhorse and the sound default for free-flowing provincial arterials, rural roads and light-traffic overlays. Easier to place and compact, which matters on a small mobile plant with a short haul from the mixer to the mat — the normal island situation. Do not carry it into a standing-load location on the reasoning that it is easier to work.
• Bitumen 60-70. The stiffer answer where loading is heavy or slow: port approaches, national arterials carrying container traffic, urban corridors. Require the measured penetration and softening point on the batch certificate rather than accepting the band, and where the case is tight, narrow the window contractually.
• Harder than 60-70. Rarely named in Philippine paving work. Treat a harder grade as a decision the tender has to justify rather than as a general improvement: every step down in penetration trades rut resistance for a stiffer, less workable mix, and workability is worth more here than in most markets because of where the plants are.
• PG 64-10 and PG 70-10. The shape of a normal Philippine performance-graded clause: the climatic grade, or the climatic grade with a one-grade slow-traffic bump. Confirm that the supplier can produce the whole M 320 schedule, including the pressure ageing vessel and bending beam lines, before agreeing to it.
• PG 76-10, or an M 332 designation of V or E. The standing-load answer, for port hardstanding, intersections, bus and jeepney stops and industrial yards. At this level the high grade is commonly reached by polymer modification rather than by a stiff straight-run binder, and the multiple stress creep recovery percent recovery result is the line that shows which one you are being offered.
• Modified binder and the island leg. Modified product in drums is straightforward. Modified product in bulk wants controlled heating and agitation to stay homogeneous, which sits badly with a tank container standing at a transhipment port waiting for a feeder sailing. On an island destination, modification is an argument for packed cargo rather than against it.
• Cutback and emulsion. Prime coat and tack coat are separate products with their own acceptance tables under AASHTO M 81, M 82, M 140 and M 208, and a paving-grade certificate evidences nothing whatever for them. The island-specific warning is about emulsion: bitumen emulsion has a finite storage life and dislikes prolonged heat, agitation and standing, which is an exact description of a drum sitting on a hot quay and then rolling on a RoRo deck for two days. Where the leg is long, buy emulsion close to the point of use or plan the shelf life explicitly and write it into the contract.
• The standing mistake. Offering 85-100 against a 60-70 clause, or the reverse, on the reasoning that the engineer will see sense. There is no mechanism in a Philippine acceptance chain for a Materials Engineer to accept a band other than the one the clause names, and on this route the discovery happens after two sea voyages.

In a mainland market, a container discharges at the port and trucks inland. Here, in most cases, the container discharges at a gateway port and then goes back onto a ship. Plan for that second leg from the first email, because it changes the answer to almost every commercial question: which packing, how long the lead time really is, who carries the cost of the domestic move, who is insured while it happens, and what happens when the second vessel does not sail.

The gateway ports

On Luzon the international gateways are the Port of Manila, comprising the Manila International Container Terminal and Manila South Harbour, together with Batangas to the south and Subic Bay to the north-west. Manila North Harbour plays a different role: it is predominantly the domestic inter-island hub rather than an import gateway. That distinction has a cost attached, because a container that arrives internationally at South Harbour or MICT and then needs a domestic feeder often has to physically move across Manila to North Harbour first — a short distance, a set of handling charges, and a road movement subject to the truck ban hours.

In the Visayas, Cebu is the regional gateway and the main transhipment point for the central islands. Iloilo serves Panay and the western Visayas. On Mindanao, Davao is the principal southern gateway, Cagayan de Oro serves the northern Mindanao corridors, and General Santos serves the far south.

The port authorities are not uniform, and it matters for clearance. Most commercial ports are operated under the Philippine Ports Authority. Cebu sits under the Cebu Port Authority. Subic Bay is a freeport administered by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, with a customs regime distinct from a standard PPA port — which can be an advantage or an irrelevance depending on where the cargo is ultimately consumed, and is worth asking the consignee's broker about rather than guessing.

The domestic leg is a separate contract of carriage

The international voyage is covered by a marine bill of lading: a negotiable document of title against which a bank can hold security. The inter-island voyage is covered by a domestic bill of lading issued by a Philippine domestic carrier, under a separate contract, with a separate carrier, separate liability limits and separate free time. Domestic shipping is regulated by the Maritime Industry Authority, which is the licensing and route authority for domestic vessels, while the ports themselves sit under the port authorities.

Three consequences follow.

• A documentary credit built on a marine bill of lading covers the first leg only. If the payment structure is meant to follow the goods to the island, it has to be drafted to do so, and generally it is not.
• Carrier liability changes at the gateway. The limits and defences available to a domestic carrier under Philippine law are not the limits under the international convention regime the marine bill was written against. This is a question for the buyer's insurance broker before it is a question for anyone else.
• The party who books the domestic leg is the party who owns its problems, including the cancelled sailing, the backlog after a storm and the demurrage on a box that could not move. Name that party in the contract.

Arrastre, stevedoring and wharfage: the port cost line that appears twice

Philippine port charging uses vocabulary an exporter may not have met. Stevedoring is the work of loading and discharging the vessel; arrastre is the handling, custody and delivery of cargo within the port area between the vessel and the consignee's transport. Both are performed by a cargo handling operator holding a contract for that port, and the port authority separately levies wharfage on cargo and berthing charges on the vessel.

No amounts are stated on this page, and they should be obtained from the consignee's broker for the specific ports. But the structural point is free: a two-leg movement passes through four port events, not two — discharge and handling at the gateway, then handling and loading onto the domestic vessel, then discharge and handling at the island port. Each of those attracts its own handling and wharfage. A landed cost model built on one set of port charges will be wrong by roughly the amount of a second set, and that gap is frequently larger than the margin being argued about on the binder price.

What the second leg does to the Incoterms rule

Under Incoterms 2020, FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF are rules for sea and inland waterway transport. They are built around a vessel and a port, and they are perfectly coherent for a parcel discharging at Manila, Cebu or Davao. They describe the international leg and nothing beyond it. The rules that work for any mode, and that can name an inland or island place, are FCA, CPT, CIP, DAP, DPU and DDP.

Five errors recur on Philippine business, and each has a specific fix.

• Quoting CFR Manila against a project on Leyte and calling it a delivered price. It is a price for the first leg. The second sea voyage, both sets of port charges at the transhipment, the domestic freight and every weather cancellation sit with the buyer from the moment the goods crossed the ship's rail at the load port. Say so explicitly in the offer so the buyer compares like with like.
• Naming a country or a port instead of a place. DAP Philippines is not a delivery term. DAP followed by the named town, plant or project site on the named island is. On this route the named place must also settle who books the domestic sailing and who bears the cost of cargo standing at a transhipment port waiting for one.
• Accepting the default insurance cover under CIF without reading it. Under Incoterms 2020, CIF requires only minimum cover, Institute Cargo Clauses (C), while CIP was upgraded to the all-risks Clauses (A). Clauses (C) is a named-perils cover. On a route involving transhipment, roll-on roll-off handling and small-berth discharge, that is thin. Where cover matters, either specify a higher level of cover in the sale contract or use CIP.
• Assuming the marine policy reaches the island. The standard Institute Cargo Clauses transit clause ends cover at the ordinary course of transit to the named destination, and in any event on the expiry of 60 days after completion of discharge from the oversea vessel at the final port of discharge. On an archipelago route, a container waiting at a gateway for a feeder sailing through a bad weather month is exactly the situation in which that clock runs out while the cargo is still in the port. Extend the cover deliberately over the domestic leg and the final haul, and confirm the transit clause wording with the broker rather than assuming it.
• Agreeing DDP. This one is close to impossible here rather than merely unwise. DDP puts import clearance and all import charges on the seller. In the Philippines that would require the seller to be an accredited importer with the Bureau of Customs and to obtain a BIR Authority to Release Imported Goods for an excisable article — an identity a foreign supplier does not have and cannot easily acquire. Treat a request for DDP into the Philippines as a signal that the counterparty has not yet spoken to a broker.

The Incoterms page sets out the rules in general; the Philippine refinement is simply that the named place has to be on the right island and that somebody has to own the water in between.

Free time, detention and the box that goes to an island

A container that is emptied near the gateway and returned is out of the shipping line's system briefly. A container that travels on a domestic feeder to a provincial island, waits for a truck, is stripped at a site and then makes the same journey in reverse is out for very much longer, and free time is a commercial term agreed at booking that cannot be recovered by argument afterwards.

This drives a routing decision that should be taken before the cargo is booked, not after the first detention invoice:

• Send the box. Cleanest, keeps the cargo sealed, and works where the island port takes containers and the domestic operator will carry the line's equipment. Ask the forwarder to confirm both, in writing.
• Strip at the gateway and move the drums on a flatbed onto a roll-on roll-off sailing. Removes the detention exposure entirely and is why so much Philippine domestic freight moves this way. It adds two handling operations, which is a real risk to drum condition and a real reason to record counts and condition at each handover.
• Use a shipper-owned or one-way container. Sometimes the answer for a remote destination; it is a commercial question for the line and the forwarder, and it changes the packing economics.

What the receiving end can actually do

Ask these before choosing a unit weight, and ask the consignee rather than inferring from the port's name:

• Is there a container berth, or is cargo worked over the side by ship's gear or into a barge?
• What lifting equipment is on the wharf, and what does it lift? A forklift rated for a drum is not a forklift rated for a one-tonne bag, and neither is a mobile crane.
• Is the project at the port, or inland of it? What is on the road in between — bridge load restrictions, width restrictions, unsealed sections?
• Can a container chassis physically reach the site, or does the cargo have to be transferred to a smaller vehicle at the town?
• Is there covered storage at the site, and how long will the material stand before it is used?
• Does the plant have a melting unit, or does it need drums it can heat individually?

Packing that a Manila terminal handles without comment can be genuinely difficult to land at a provincial berth. The answers above decide the unit weight far more reliably than the packaging cost per tonne does.

Two rules that shape the routing

The first is Republic Act 10668, the Foreign Ships Co-Loading Act of 2015, which relaxed the country's cabotage restrictions so that a foreign vessel carrying imported cargo may co-load and carry that cargo onward between Philippine ports. In practical terms this means it is sometimes possible for an import container to be carried to a secondary port on the same foreign carrier instead of being discharged in Manila and re-shipped on a domestic feeder. Whether a particular service actually does it is a carrier question, not a legal one, so ask the forwarder for the routing in writing before assuming either answer. Where it is available it removes a transhipment, a set of port charges and a weather exposure at once, which makes it worth asking about explicitly rather than waiting to be offered it.

The second is the Metro Manila truck ban, a long-standing set of restrictions on container truck movement during peak hours in the capital, administered for the metropolitan road network by the metropolitan development authority and separately by individual city ordinances, so the rules are not uniform across the built-up area. It is one of the reasons importers route Luzon cargo through Batangas or Subic when the project is outside Metro Manila. The permitted hours change, so treat this as something to confirm with the haulier for the week of delivery rather than a fixed fact.

Beyond those two, axle-load and gross-weight limits are enforced on the national network, and inter-island and provincial bridges carry posted load restrictions that are revised after inspection. Fix the packing and the drum count with the container arithmetic further down this page, then ask the haulier how that tonnage converts into vehicles on the specific alignment. Container arithmetic does not transfer to a road vehicle and it certainly does not transfer to a provincial bridge.

The Philippines is the most tropical-cyclone-exposed country in the region. The national weather service, PAGASA, monitors a defined Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR), and in an average year roughly twenty tropical cyclones enter it, with something like eight or nine making landfall. The season runs broadly from June to November, with the heaviest activity in the middle of that window, though systems outside those months are not unusual.

Why it hits a bitumen cargo twice

The construction effect is the obvious one. Asphalt cannot be laid in rain and a saturated base cannot be compacted, so paving programmes stop and restart around weather. Binder demand follows, and in a country where two of the four climate types have no dry season at all, the working window in some regions is defined entirely by the weather rather than by a calendar.

The shipping effect is the one that catches suppliers. When PAGASA raises tropical cyclone wind signals over an area, the Philippine Coast Guard suspends vessel departures in the affected waters. A domestic feeder or roll-on roll-off sailing is not delayed by a few hours in that situation — it is cancelled, and cargo waits at the transhipment port until sailings resume and the backlog clears. On a two-leg route, a weather event that never touches your international vessel can still hold your cargo for days. That is the specific archipelago risk, and it is why the domestic leg should never be scheduled with zero slack.

The wind signal scale, and what each level means for a sailing

PAGASA raises Tropical Cyclone Wind Signals numbered 1 to 5 over specific localities, based on the wind expected there rather than on the storm's own intensity. The bands are:

• Signal No. 1 — winds of 39 to 61 km/h expected
• Signal No. 2 — 62 to 88 km/h
• Signal No. 3 — 89 to 117 km/h
• Signal No. 4 — 118 to 184 km/h
• Signal No. 5 — 185 km/h or higher

The lead time shortens as the number rises, from around a day and a half of warning at Signal No. 1 down to roughly half a day at the highest signals. Two operational points follow. First, the suspension of sailings is graduated by vessel type and size as well as by signal number: the smallest craft and wooden-hulled inter-island vessels stop first, so a roll-on roll-off or a small feeder can be held while larger vessels still sail. A cargo on the domestic leg is therefore stopped by weather that would not have stopped it on the ocean leg. Second, signals are raised by locality, so a signal over the route is enough even where neither the origin nor the destination is affected.

Two names for the same storm

This is a small point that causes real confusion in correspondence. PAGASA assigns its own local name to every tropical cyclone that enters the Philippine Area of Responsibility, drawn from a rotating national list, while the regional meteorological centre assigns an international name to the same system. One storm therefore has two names, and a forwarder's advisory, a shipping line's notice and an international weather report may each be using a different one. When a delay is being explained or a force majeure notice is being served, ask for both names and the dates, so that everyone in the chain is discussing the same system.

The storm that never arrives can still stop the job

The most under-appreciated Philippine weather mechanism is not landfall at all. A tropical cyclone sitting well offshore, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away and never entering the country, can enhance the south-west monsoon and pull days of continuous heavy rain across western Luzon and the western Visayas. The rainfall totals from an enhanced monsoon event can exceed those from a direct hit, and they arrive with no landfall, no wind signal in the affected area and no obvious storm on a map. Paving stops, the base saturates, and site access on unsealed provincial roads becomes the binding constraint. A contract clause that keys force majeure only to a declared typhoon warning does not cover this, and it should be drafted with the actual mechanism in mind.

The monsoons, and why a national dry season is a myth

Two monsoons frame the year. The habagat, the south-west monsoon, runs roughly June to September and brings the wet season to the western side of Luzon and the Visayas. The amihan, the north-east monsoon, runs roughly November to February, bringing cooler drier air to those same western areas — while bringing rain to the eastern seaboard.

That inversion matters. Parts of eastern Luzon, the eastern Visayas and much of eastern Mindanao receive rain distributed through the year and have no pronounced dry season at all. A statement about the national dry season is therefore unreliable for any specific project. Ask where the project is, not just which country it is in, and check which climate type it sits in.

The shear line, and why the amihan season is not a safe shipping season either

Between roughly December and February, a shear line — the boundary where the cold north-easterly surge meets warm easterly air — regularly sets up over the eastern Visayas and northern Mindanao and produces days of heavy rain and flooding well outside the typhoon season. In the same months, strong amihan surges cause PAGASA to issue gale warnings over specific seaboards, and the Coast Guard acts on those exactly as it acts on a cyclone signal: small craft and inter-island vessels are held.

The consequence deserves stating flatly, because it contradicts the intuitive plan. Shipping to a Visayan or eastern Mindanao island in January is not the safe alternative to shipping in September. It is a different risk with a different mechanism and a similar effect on a feeder schedule. The genuinely lower-risk windows are regional and they have to be taken from the destination's own climate type and record.

Mindanao is a different risk profile, but only for cyclones

Most tropical cyclone tracks pass north of Mindanao, and southern Mindanao in particular sits largely below the usual track. A discharge at Davao or General Santos in September carries a materially different tropical cyclone risk from a discharge at Manila or Cebu in the same month. When a buyer has flexibility on the gateway port, this is a real consideration rather than a marginal one. It does not, however, make Mindanao dry: much of it sits in the climate type with rainfall distributed evenly through the year, and its eastern seaboard takes the shear line in the amihan months.

El Niño, La Niña and the year you are actually shipping in

Philippine rainfall is strongly modulated by the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and PAGASA issues seasonal climate advisories accordingly. Broadly, El Niño conditions tend toward drier-than-normal seasons and fewer cyclones entering the area, while La Niña conditions tend toward wetter seasons and more of them. A shipment plan built on long-run climatology in a strongly forced year is planning against the wrong distribution. This is not a reason to speculate; it is a reason to check the current seasonal advisory before agreeing a shipment window, and to say in the contract what happens if the window is missed.

How the demand year is shaped

Two calendars drive Philippine binder demand. The first is the weather: paving concentrates in the drier months, which across much of Luzon and the western Visayas runs from around the turn of the year through May, so contractors want binder in position ahead of it. The second is fiscal. The Philippine national budget runs on the calendar year, so agency obligation and disbursement pressure builds toward the end of December. That combination produces a demand rhythm that does not match markets running an April-to-March fiscal year, such as India, and a supplier who plans a Philippine shipment on Indian seasonality will be early or late rather than on time.

There is a second-order effect worth noticing. Because the dry window and the fiscal push overlap only partly, the busiest procurement period and the busiest paving period are not the same months, and material bought against a December obligation is frequently material that will not be laid until the following dry season. That means it will be stored, often on site, often on an island, often in the open unless somebody specifies otherwise. Storage life, drum condition and covered storage are therefore commercial questions on this market and not housekeeping ones.

What to write into the contract

• Agree a shipment window, not a shipment date, and say which leg the window applies to.
• State explicitly what happens if a port closure, a wind signal or a gale warning suspends domestic sailings and delays the second leg, and who bears the cost of the wait. Draft the clause around the mechanism — suspension of sailings, enhanced monsoon rainfall, shear line flooding — rather than around the word typhoon.
• Build slack into any domestic transhipment scheduled between roughly July and October, and do not assume December to February is slack-free on eastern routes.
• Fix container free time at the point of booking, since a weather delay is exactly the situation in which detention accumulates and exactly the situation in which nobody can do anything about it.
• Check that the marine cargo cover has been extended over the domestic leg and the final haul, and check the transit clause's time limit against a realistic worst case for a delayed feeder.
• Ask the consignee to confirm the excise and ATRIG route before the vessel sails, so the cargo is not sitting on a quay through a storm waiting for a document.
• Where material will be stored for a season before it is laid, agree covered storage and the drum condition standard in writing, and photograph the stack on arrival.