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."

Comments

Like much innovation, it was resisted

[John Jorsett]

I'm old enough to remember when containerization was just beginning to ramp up. The stevedores (the guys who manually shifted the goods from ship to shore and vice versa) were really upset because it would reduce the number of jobs (their contracts typically let them set the number of men on each job. Nice deal, that) and make their pilfering from the cargo much tougher. Somebody estimated that 5% or so of consumer goods never made it to the destination. There were violent strikes and sabotage of the port facilities during that time. Goes to show that when you kick over somebody's rice bowl, no matter how much better you might be making things, you're going to get pushback. A lesson that still applies, these days for the Uber economy.

Re:There's still the pollution thing

[CharlieG]

BTW, when you work it out to 34000 teeshirts/container, that total use of fuel is .00011 gallons of fuel to move that shirt from China to the US - so say I'm off on my numbers by a factor of 10, so it took 1/1000 of a gallon of fuel to move that shirt trans pacific. Now if we figure 10 Kilos of CO2/Gallon (Per the US EIA), we are talking .01 Kilos of CO2. Assume you live a 20 minute round trip to the store, and weigh 160 lbs (adult male) - aka 10 minutes walk to the store, 10 mins back - the formula I saw said .00002lbs of CO2 emitted per minute walking per lb of person, so you emit .029 kilos of CO2 walking to and from the store, YES, nearly THREE times the CO2 as transporting the shirt from China. Interesting to put in in perspective, isn't it? And THAT is saying my numbers are off by 10x - my actual number shows you are emitting 30x the CO2 walking to the store and back

Re:There's still the pollution thing

[MountainLogic]

Indeed, we did have a great rail system, but it has been perverted by energy companies exporting coal and oil. The coal and oil companies have cut monopolistic deals to buy up all the capacity on many lines. They are able to do this by making big buys. This has forced others who ship periodically to rely on much more expensive trucks. In some cases farmers who have used these lines for over 100 years have not been able to get product to market because trucking cost more than their profit. Also our rail lines are perpetually in decay and we are loosing many miles of feeder lines that service warehouse and factories districts every year causing a reverse Metcalf effect that will eventually kill the utility of our critical rail system.