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The Box That Built the Modern World
HughPickens.com writes: Andrew Curry has an interesting article about how more than any other single innovation, the shipping container epitomizes the enormity, sophistication, and importance of our modern transportation system. It's invisible to most people, but fundamental to how practically everything in our consumer-driven lives works. "Think of the shipping container as the Internet of thing," says Curry. "Just as your email is disassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, then re-assembled in your recipient's inbox later, the uniform, ubiquitous boxes are designed to be interchangeable, their contents irrelevant." Last year the world's container ports moved 560 million 20-foot containers. Even cars and trucks—known in the trade as "RoRo," or "roll-on, roll-off" cargo—are increasingly being loaded into containers rather than specialized ships. "Containers are just a lot easier," says James Rice. "A box is a box. All you need is a vessel, a berth, and a place to put the container on the ground.
Consider the economics of a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost per shirt? "Less than one U.S. cent," says Rainer Horn. "It doesn't matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren't important."
Consider the economics of a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost per shirt? "Less than one U.S. cent," says Rainer Horn. "It doesn't matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren't important."
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson
A really good read
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
They meant the cost to transport the shirt was one cent. Not the unit cost of the shirt, of course.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
What the fuck is "efficiently" shipped from China.
You do understand how cargo ships work? And the literal crap they burn for fuel.
More containers than you can count, all bound for the same destination, all travelling in a single ship. Granted, that ships burns a lot of fuel, but that's still more efficient than most other ways of shipping that number of containers. Short of bringing back sails (which has been floated a few times) container ships are among the most efficient means of freight transport across long distances.
As for the "literal" crap they burn for fuel, first read a dictionary, and second that crap would otherwise go to waste. It's cheap to produce and relatively cleanly used.
Define: less.
You certainly need to travel less distance. However, modern container ships are fearsomely efficient. They've been banging on about "green" and "low carbon" recently, but they've always been practicing that since it reduces costs and increases the very slim profit margins.
In terms of shipping, it'll take easily as much, probably substantially more carbon getting the goods from the dock to your door as it does getting them from China to your nearest major container port. The engines on those ships hit over 50% thermal efficiency for the best of them, which is second only giant land based combined cycle plants (it's better than coal plants). That combined with immense volume (drag is related to area, so size pays off well) and slow speed means that container ships are quite astonishingly efficient.
I crunched the numbers once for curiosity and was amazed by the results.
Buying local can save a bit, but not nearly as much as you think. Nonetheless, there's still other good reasons for buying local, and I try to do it where possible.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You could always, as a friend of mine did, hang the toilet seat by the wood stove inside the house, and carry it out when you wanted to use it.