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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
If you buy local, you need less transport
Transport costs are very low, and energy used in transport is likely a lot lower than you think (which is why the cost is low). If you live in California, you may think you are being "green" by eating local California grapes instead of grapes from Chile. But you are wrong. The California grapes are grown with energy intensive irrigation. The water is pumped for hundreds of miles. The Chilean grapes are grown with rainwater. That makes a much bigger difference than the transport of the final product.
As a general rule of thumb, the product produced with the least resources, is the one with the lowest price.
Not necessarily. You have to take into account the efficiency of the transport. From the figures I've seen, the fuel cost to ship something from China to the U.S. is about the same as the fuel cost to transport it from a U.S. port to its final destination inland (the U.S. has a terrible rail system so most goods are transported by relatively inefficient trucks).
Assuming the 1 cent to transport a T-shirt from China figure is correct, if you're driving more than 500 feet to buy your "local" T-shirt, you're producing more pollution buying from that local store. It's even questionable if walking that distance has a smaller pollution footprint because of the energy cost needed to produce the food you ate which powers your walk to the local store. (And no, you cannot bypass this by growing a home garden. People vastly underestimate how much land is needed to grow the food we eat. Now factor in the energy needed to work all that land, and you'll quickly find that you'll need to increase your daily caloric intake to 5000-8000 kcal/day if you farm that by hand. There's a very good reason we shifted that inefficient labor-intensive task to being done by machines.)
Maximum energy efficiency is achieved when you multitask and group multiple tasks together. That's how buying stuff on Amazon can end up cheaper with a smaller energy footprint than buying stuff locally. Yes if Amazon were to ship just one T-shirt to you and UPS sent a truck out to deliver just one T-shirt to your house, it' be horribly inefficient. But that UPS truck makes a hundred or so deliveries on its daily route so the portion of its total drive attributable to your T-shirt package delivery is only a few hundred or few thousand feet. Likewise Amazon processes millions of orders every day, so the portion of its operating costs attributable to your single order is very small. This is also the same reason the big department stores end up being able to offer lower prices than the small mom and pop shop - greater volume of sales generates more opportunity for efficiency improvements. If you can come up with a way to combine big box efficiency with the mom and pop buying experience, you'll become the next billionaire.
Oh yes, I'm typing at my Canadian keyboard on my American computer sitting on my locally produced chair.... Wait, let me check. IKEA desk, made in China, keyboard, computer, chair, all China, as a matter of fact, the only things I have that are built in North America is my collection of vintage test gear.
And this technology that keeps getting better, when will I see a reduced workweek because of it?
Correct. People don't realize how fuel EFFICIENT shipping really is. At "Slow" speeds (18 knots) where more than 1/2 the worlds cargo ships run, and figuring a 9000-10000 TEU ship (aka holds 9000-10000 20 ft containers, 1/2 that if all 40Ft boxes) - the ship will typically burn 100 Tons of fuel/day - or 1/100th of a ton of fuel per container/day, and roughly (because bunker C - the 'crap they burn' - Now there are roughly depending on exact fuel 250-280 gallons/ton of fuel - so it takes about 1/4 gallon of fuel per DAY to move each one of those containers. But the joke? Go to the online shipping calculators - China to west coast USA (where it will get put on a train) - 15 days, NOT 15. So you are talking roughly 3.75 gallons of fuel to move that container of tee-shirts from China to the US - that's the container, all the goods etc.
Work the math. You probably burn more fuel per shirt driving to the store, picking up the shirt, and driving home than shipping it from China takes. Remember - ships float, and take surprisingly little fuel per ton to move freight. It is why canals were such a big deal back when - a full barge of coal or gravel or whatever could be moved by ONE horse.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
It's okay - we were told, just a few days ago, that the most important innovation was the refrigerator. Now it's a shipping container. Maybe next week it will be the transistor. At this point, I guess all we're supposed to do is howl and screech like monkeys and occasionally throw poop at one another in a maelstrom of conflicting information.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
It's funny, because I think you overlook the odd commonalities between the old-fashioned stevedore model and the Uber model.
Both of them are based on an idea that having a steady job with consistent employees is unnecessary. It's obviously cheaper to hire people on demand.
The traditional model for stevedores were guys who'd show up at the docks every morning and just HOPE they might get enough work that day to get paid and go home and feed their families. That just depended on whether the shipping schedules and amount of goods happened to be enough to support them.
The life of a lot of these guys was terrible -- they worked hard, when they could, but they had no job security at all... since they had no "job," per se. If they had an unlucky accident and hurt their backs or whatever, they could be out on the street begging.
Then, at some point, through strikes workers' rights movements, the stevedores finally achieved REAL jobs.
Ironically, the "Uber economy" you favor is heading toward putting its "contract workers" (people who struggle to cobble together enough part-time work to live) back in the same place that the stevedores were before unions... standing on the docks, hoping that enough ships come in today to feed the family.
(P.S. I'm not arguing in favor of corrupt unions, nor am I celebrating destructive stevedore protests. But I think we need to realize why those stevedores were so upset to lose their jobs... those were hard-won concessions that they fought to get out of an "Uber economy" model, because it made their lives miserable.)