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Are Folding Containers the Future of Shipping?
swellconvivialguy writes "Earlier this year Maersk ordered 20 super-size container ships—each to have '16 percent larger capacity than today's largest container vessel, Emma Maersk.' But instead of embracing the bigger/more-is-better mentality, Staxxon, a NJ-based startup, has engineered a folding steel container (it folds like a toddler's playpen), which is designed to make shipping more efficient by 'reducing the number of container ship movements.' No one has yet succeeded in the marketplace with a collapsible container, but Staxxon has made a point of learning from the mistakes of others."
So why are we posting ads written as articles on Slashdot? I fail to see how this is news for Nerds. It really has nothing to do with the normal topics of slashdot as well as being an ad.
Looks like a cool concept, though it looks like it takes much more human contact than regular shipping containers do (when being folded). This could be a problem, as a lot of the bigger shipping yards are automated and/or move containers around using large machines.
We'll have to see if the increase in human contact is worth the space saved when shipping empty containers around.
Having to slide 4 very heavy folded containers onto those bars seems like it might be difficult. It seems like it would get a lot worse after the container has made several trips across the ocean in the salt air.
Also, the folding process seems like a drag, although high volume sites would probably have a specialized rig just to fold them and unfold them if these becomes accepted.
It's too bad shipping containers are higher than they are wide, because it would seem like flattening 5 and turning them on their side and stacking them up would be more straightforward than this rod stuff.
What happens if you only have 3 or 4, can you still fold them, or only in 5s?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
While somewhat time consuming, I could see this being beneficial for the train and trucking industry (if they're not too heavy).
With trucks especially, you could send a convoy of 5 or so out, and then have 1 bring it back, and the other 4 haul something else. With trains, weight is less of an issue, but it's always good to use less cars just for empty space, as the frames themselves add weight.
No, I thought of Zaxxon. God I feel old...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Or perhaps we could sell things to asia. If the containers going from the US to asia were not empty then there would be no need for them to fold.
That's just crazy talk.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
While this company's idea is interesting, it is still two years away from even being approved for commercial use. There are at least two competitors with easier, simpler to use technology:
Indian Shipping Company
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV-R5jlf6bQ&feature=related
Dutch variant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHlTrOVv9gs&feature=related
The problem, so many shipping containers just pilling up unused in the Western world, and forcing the creation of countless new containers in Asia, is certainly worth solving. But so many companies have tried and failed before. For my money, the Indian or Dutch version seems that more likely to win out. India has far lower steel costs, and is at the centre of shipping between Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia.
The Dutch one is too lightweight. And having the sides fold might seem like a great idea, but when you stack 4 more containers on it and go crashing through waves, you have to start wondering if it's going to fold up when it isn't supposed to.
Also, a roll-up door on the end? You must be kidding me. What happens when the contents shift? You may end up with something leaning on the door and keeping it from rolling up or just flat out bending the door so it won't roll. The sturdy doors of a standard container (or the Indian one) are stronger and open outward so you don't have to give up space inside for the door tracks and stowage space.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You can't do that. Imbalances in amount of cargo going East vs West are inevitable because of trade imbalances, but Kirchoff's laws also apply to container ships: Every container ship going East must return West.
Say there are 5 container ships with containers full of cargo which travel from China to the U.S. On the return trip, say there's only one container ship's worth of cargo. So you load one container ship with cargo for the return trip. The containers from the other 4 ships you collapse and load onto a second ship. You've now loaded all the containers needed for the next 5 ships worth of cargo onto 2 ships heading back to China. Great! You've eliminated the need for 3 ships on the return leg, right? Wrong. Once those containers get back to China and are loaded up with cargo, you now have 5 ships worth of cargo containers, but only 2 ships to transport them. Those 3 ships you left in the U.S. have to make the return trip to China regardless of whether they're loaded or empty.
The number of container ship movements is dictated by the maximum amount of cargo traveling between two destinations one-way, not the minimum. The minimum is irrelevant since you need the empty containers and container ships to make the return trip anyway to ferry the next batch of cargo along the maximum one-way route. The only way you can reduce the number of container ship movements is to scrap the 3 container ships you left in the U.S., and replace them with 3 new ones built in China. That's just not economically feasible. You might be able to shaft some of the ship captains into having to make an empty trip back to China, but all that'll do is cause them to raise the price they charge for the next trip from China to the U.S. The net result is no reduction in container ship movements, and no reduction in fuel consumed, and no reduction in overall cost.
Folder containers is not a new idea but it is not used enough.
Back about 15 years ago, I worked in a TDK plant where they made VHS cassettes, among other things. Everyday, several dozen tractor trailers would unload container loads of bulk videotape shipped in from Japan. The US plant would take that and make individual cassettes for several different brands.
The tape had to be shipped in these special blue crates to keep it from getting contaminated or loose or damaged. Each crate had special fittings and holders for giant reels of tape. Once each crate was unloaded, it was folded up and about four or five of those folded crates could fit into the space of one fully-assembled crate. The crates were designed to disassemble, interlock and fit without any extra parts needed. Meanwhile all the reel holders and things were tucked inside. It was kind of a transformer box.
The combined stacks of five took up exactly as much space as a single full crate. As one unit, that stack of five was then sent back to Japan to be reloaded with more blank tape. This saved a lot on the container space going back and meant they significantly reduced costs.
I've never again seen anything quite like those TDK crates. Sure, there are folding crates and the like, but this was something else beyond any of that. It was clearly designed to do that from the start and you don't often see that kind of integration in a process. Walmart comes close with the way they reuse cardboard boxes.
Sig for hire.
The way containerships are built now, empties are frequently used to balance the weight distribution of the vessel. Folding them up won't create more capacity because they aren't built with the expectation of being loaded to the brim with fully loaded containers, and condensing empties creates space but condenses weight. A containership taking on full loads will only hit about 70% of its slot capacity due to weight constraints.
Also, wear and tear on moving parts in the shipping industry should not be overlooked. Twist locks, the things that lock containers together on ships, are very simple mechanisms that are built with extreme robustness. Doesn't matter, they constantly break and have to be replaced during ship operations. This solution is much more suscpetible to breakage than twist locks.
The only thing these containers do is make trade lane management more fluid and make empty storage more efficient for shipping terminals/container yards, but at the cost of equipment maintenance, labor, and reliability. The costs won't offset the benefits until the worldwide port infastructure or shipping capacity is bursting at the seams (creating space issues and a premium on crane productivity). That simply isn't the case.
Drive past any major port in the US. Chances are you will see acres of empty shipping containers stacked up doing nothing. Those ships are going back empty anyway because its cheaper then moving the now empty containers back to their source. Even if the collapsible containers don't return to Asia, they will certainly take up less real estate here in the USA.
no I live in reality where it takes a minimum of a month to even find an empty container and it might take another month before its even on a boat, you might know that if you have ever scheduled them ...
reality:
container is scheduled, a minimum of a month passes
you have 2 hours to load or 300 or so bucks in charges per hour
2 months later it has managed to travel cross country in the USA
Another month later its loaded onto a boat
2 months later its received by Korea (in my position)
Another month passes and its cleared by customs and delivered
with a 6 month backlog just to make it from the east coast to Asia where is this magic surplus they claim? Hell I am still scheduling arrivals from last year.
Good point. Seems they need to find a way to fold ships, too.
Similar to bikes, planes and (to some extent) cars.
The folding/unfolding is what bothers me too.
They will not make too much difference for trucking: a container truck can carry a shipping container, not much else. Not likely that if you send out two trucks that one can take back both empty boxes, and the other something else. There is just not much "something else" to carry.
Difference is made in storage yards: less space taken. And on container vessels: there is much much more volume of cargo going from China to the US and EU than the other way around, and liners routinely ship empty containers all the way back to China. Finished products simply contain much more air than raw materials, one container of raw materials can easily become five containers of finished product.
The unfolding is what bugs me most. The roof has to be pushed up and become level, then someone has to put in those heavy metal bars. And that's high up, a container is about 2m30 tall, so not easy to do. Needs machines again. Though of course this folding/unfolding will usually be done in container yards only, so then special equipment can be installed.
It's cheaper to produce new containers not just because of weight, but because of port restrictions. Once a container with a wooden floor (i.e. most of them) has entered certain ports, it has to be gassed before it can re-enter certain other ports, allegedly to prevent the spread of certain pests. This is more expensive than just buying another container. Since people are starting to warm up to container-based architecture, there's even a use for the discarded containers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you missed the point. They are not trying to reduce the number of container ship movements, they are trying to reduce the number of container movements.
They are trying to reduce the time and energy associated with moving containers around the port. Containers get moved from a staging area, to near the ship, then onto the ship, then off the ship (but still near the ship), then out to a staging area again. And on top of that, many cargo routes include multiple ports on each continent, so ships are re-stacked multiple times -- containers that are not destined for a particular port may still need to be moved around the ship or even offloaded then reloaded.
The energy costs associated with container moves isn't covered in the same way by your analysis. I would summarize your analysis as saying that empty containers "dead head" on their trip back to Asia: -- the ship is going back to Asia anyway, so the baseline cost of moving the ship is not a factor, weight is the overwhelming determiner of marginal fuel consumption, therefore it doesn't matter how much space the containers take up, only how much weight.
But this is not the same for container moves in port, as they are not "dead heads". For these moves, we do have to include the baseline cost of the crane moving (since it wasn't otherwise going to move from this stack to that stack). Therefore, it does, indeed, take less energy to lift five collapsed containers onto a ship in one move than to lift five separately, because you save all the extra baseline energy associated with crane moving four more times.
The time savings could be an even more significant contributor to cost savings. Because it's not just the wages of the guys working the port. If you had enough of these collapsibles in the system that you could reliably reduce the length of a port call, then every item on the ship would spend less time in transit (savings to the shipper) and each ship could complete more round trips in a year (savings to the cargo line).
Where your analysis continues to be effective, however, is in the portwarehouse portion of the trip. There really is no cost savings to having these things collapsed at the warehouse. Every truck that goes to the warehouse needs to come back to the port to pick up the next container. And if you collapse the container, the chassis (wheels/undercarriage that the container goes on) needs to come back to the port anyway. Frankly, this would be a nightmare to try to do this at the warehouse, since the warehouses are almost universally NOT set up to even take the containers of the chassis in the first place.
So I think the guys in the article (and the few competitors mentioned in the comments here) have all missed the boat. What they need to develop is a super-efficient way to collapse containers. Not a system that is pretty efficient for one or two guys to do, but one is done automatically by some big machine that would be located at the port. Trucks pulling empties would pull right up in front of this machine. A crane integrated into the machine would take the container off the chassis and everything would be automated from there. The containers would be collapsed, nested and come out the other side ready to be handled like any other container. The only way collapsing empty containers creates real cost savings is if many/most of the empties are handled this way, and you're going to offset all of those savings if you've got guys manually collapsing these things using forklifts.