Standing in its shadow, it’s hard toappreciate just how big the Hong Kong Express is.From stem to stern, it’s 1,200 feet, nearly a quarter of a mile; from side toside it’s 157 feet, about as wide as some mega yachts are long. Fully loaded,it can carry 13,167 20-foot-longcontainers, the standard box used in commerce around the world. Laidend to end, that many boxes—each one containing anything from T-shirts to TVsto truck parts—would stretch for 50 miles.
As the spring sun climbed higher, glinting off the placid Elbe River, somecranes nestled containers into towering metal racks on the ship’s deck whileothers lifted boxes out. At full tilt, Altenwerder’s custom-built cranes cansimultaneously load and unload more than 150 containers per hour. Already, fullracks of Asia-bound cargo towered 50 feet above the deck, corrugated steelcontainers stacked like Lego blocks six deep. Still more hid unseen within thebehemoth’s matte crimson hull.
Before Wednesday dawned, the Hong Kong Express wouldbe underway once more, sailing 70 miles down the Elbe to its mouth on the NorthSea. Once it edged away from the Hamburg dock, its progress amounts to asnapshot of global commerce: first a brief westward sail to the English port ofSouthampton, then nearly a month chugging at 25 miles per hour to Singapore.
After a brief stop, the vessel worked its way north. By early June, itwould edge into Busan, South Korea. Next stop, China: first Shanghai, then toNingbo bordering Hangzhou Bay, and finally to the megacity of Shenzhen. Itwould return once more to Singapore before wheeling about and heading backtoward Europe.
In less than two months the Hong Kong Express called at 11 ports and traveledmore than 12,500 miles. Circling the world four or five times a year, it canmove 1.4 million tons of cargo annually. That’s the equivalent of 1.8 billioniPads. The ship is a link in a long, complicated, and precise global supplychain made possible by the humble boxes on board.
More than any other singleinnovation, the shipping container—there are millions out there, all just likethe ones stacked on the Hong Kong Express butfor a coat of paint and a serial number—epitomizes the enormity,sophistication, and importance of our modern transportation system. Invisibleto most people, they’re fundamental to how practically everything in ourconsumer-driven lives works.
Think of the shipping container asthe Internet of things. Just as your email isdisassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, thenre-assembled in your recipient’s inbox later, the uniform, ubiquitous boxes aredesigned to be interchangeable, their contents irrelevant.
Once they enter the stream of global shipping, the boxes are shifted androuted by sophisticated computer systems that determine their arrangement onboard and plot the most efficient route to get them from point to point. Theexact placement of each box is a critical part of the equation: Ships make manystops, and a box scheduled to be unloaded late in the journey can’t be placedabove one slated for offloading early. Imagine a block of 14,000 interlockedLego bricks—now imagine trying to pull one out from the middle.
The container’s efficiency has provento be an irresistible economic force. Last year the world’s container portsmoved 560 million 20-foot containers—nearly 1.5 billion tons of cargoaltogether. Though commodities like petroleum, steel ore, and coal still movein specially designed bulk cargo ships, more than 90 percent of therest—everything from clothes to cars to computers—now travels inside shipping containers. “Reefer” containers, insulated andequipped with cooling units, carry refrigerated cargo and are plugged intopower sources on ships or at dockside. Because the containers are allidentical, any ship can move them.
Those already huge numbers areexpected to grow. Increasingly, cargo companies are looking for ways to movebulk cargo in containers, fitting the steel boxes with bladders to transportliquid chemicals or cleaning them and using polypropylene liners to moveanything from soy, corn, and wheat to salt and sugar.
Andrew Curry
Imagine a block of 14,000 interlocked Lego bricks—now imagine trying to pull one out from the middle.
Even cars and trucks—known in the trade as “RoRo,” or “roll-on,roll-off” cargo—are increasingly being loaded into containers rather thanspecialized ships. “Containers are just a lot easier,” says James Rice, deputydirector of the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT. “A box is abox. All you need is a vessel, a berth, and a place to put the container on theground.”
By driving the cost of shipping internationally way down and the speedof global commerce way up, containers made the globalization of manufacturingpossible. Yet for all the concept’s seeming simplicity, the actual process isfiendishly complex.
To get a sense of how the systemworks, imagine one of the containers aboard the Hong KongExpress, which is owned by German shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd. Askedto trace a product through a typical container voyage, Hapag-Lloyd spokesmanRainer Horn suggests a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing, the kind youmight buy at H&M.
Tagged, folded, and boxed, the T-shirt would be “stuffed” into acontainer with 33,999 identical shirts at the factory. Once sealed with aplastic tag and listed on a computerized manifest, the merchandise could passthrough nearly three dozen steps before arriving at a discount clothingretailer’s distribution center near Munich. There’s the trucker who moves thebox to a waiting ship in Xinjiang, the feeder ship that moves it to Singaporeto be loaded onto a bigger Europe-bound freighter, the crane operator inHamburg, customs officials, train engineers, and more.
Yet the container’s uniformity smooths each step of the way. Trucks andtrains are fitted to haul the identical boxes; cranes are designed to lift thesame thing over and over. The total time in transit for a typical box from aChinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost pershirt? “Less than one U.S. cent,” Horn says. “It doesn’t matter anymore whereyou produce something now, because transport costs aren’t important.”
Though containers today seem ubiquitous—so much a part of the modernlandscape that they’re used for cheap housing on the outskirts of Berlin, snowremoval in Helsinki, and disaster relief in Haiti—the steel boxes are actuallya fairly recent phenomenon. Hamburg has been a major European port for nearly amillennium, going back to the days of the Hanseatic League, a federation offree ports around the North and Baltic Seas that thrived in the Middle Ages.For nearly all of that time, shipping was essentially the same: Each vessel waslaboriously loaded and unloaded by hand, a process that could take weeks.Longshoremen laid hands on each piece of cargo that went into a ship’s hold,packing bags of grain, wood crates, and pallets into “breakbulk” ships piecemeal.It was a difficult, dangerous job, with unpredictable results; theft, breakage,and delays were common.
Shippers and manufacturers actedaccordingly: “So long as cargo was handled one item at a time, with long delaysat the docks and complicated interchanges between trucks, trains, planes, andships, freight transportation was too unpredictable for manufacturers to takethe risk that supplies from faraway places would arrive on time,” writes MarcLevinson in his definitive history of the container, The Box: How the ShippingContainer Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.Parts were sourced locally, or purchased far in advance and stockpiled inwarehouses until needed.
“A box is a box. All you need is avessel, a berth, and a place to put the container on the ground,” says Rice.
It took a pugnacious North Carolinian named Malcom McLean to launch thecontainer revolution. An ambitious truck-company owner with little experiencewhen it came to shipping, McLean—who had made a fortune in trucking in the boomyears after WWII—was looking for a way to move goods up and down the EastCoast’s traffic-choked highways faster and more cheaply.
His inspired idea: Put truck trailers on ships and bypass the roadsaltogether. Trucks could roll their trailers onto ships in North Carolina; thetrailers would be unloaded in New York and hitched to trucks, then driven therest of the way to their destinations. He soon refined the concept evenfurther, doing away with the trailer wheels and axles, which couldn’t bestacked, and settling for just the trailer body. On April 26, 1956, McLean’sfirst container ship—a military-surplus WWII tanker—sailed from Newark toHouston loaded with containers custom-built for his company, Pan-Atlantic.
Around the same time, other companies began introducing their ownprimitive containers—as much a response to theft and breakage as toinefficiency. The boxes came in all shapes and sizes, from 4.5-foot-widesteel-framed crates with plywood sides to steel boxes 15 feet long. Some weredesigned to be lifted in and out of ship holds using cranes, others withforklifts. Cranes belonging to Grace Lines couldn’t unload containers belongingto Pan-Atlantic.
To fulfill their potential, dozens of players—from shipping companies torailroads and truck chassis manufacturers—had to agree on a standard. Years ofdebate, overseen by a little-known government agency called the United StatesMaritime Administration, resulted in a 1961 agreement that only ships built tocarry boxes 10, 20, 30, and 40 feet long would be eligible for federalsubsidies. A few years later, the International Standards Organization agreedon a common design for corner fittings, making it possible to standardizecranes, too. The resulting steel rectangle—20 feet long, 8 feet wide and about8 feet tall—became known as a TEU, or 20-foot equivalent unit. The TEU quicklybecame the yardstick of global commerce.
The first trans-Atlantic container ships set sail in 1966, filled withwhiskey headed to the U.S. and guns on their way to Europe. Liquor bottles weretraditionally a target for light-fingered longshoremen, and Scotch exporterswere quickly sold on container-sized tanks that allowed them to ship theirproduct in bulk and bottle it in the U.S. On the eastbound voyage, nearly everyberth was filled with U.S. military cargo destined for the 250,000 Americansoldiers stationed in West Germany.
McLean’s idea set a revolution in motion. “The early trans-Atlanticcontainer ships could be unloaded and reloaded more quickly, so containershipsspent less time at the dock than breakbulk ships,” says Levinson.“Consequently, each one could make more voyages in the course of a year.”
In the decade that followed, container shipping overcame its rivals withthe inevitability of a rising tide. “From whiskey distillers in Scotland toapple growers in Australia, major users of international shipping abandonedbreakbulk freight as soon as regular container shipping was able to meet theirneeds,” Levinson writes. By the mid-’80s, the cost of shipping goods from Asiato North America had fallen by more than 50 percent.
Since then, container traffic has continued its steady climb. The Portof Los Angeles, America’s busiest container port, handled 476,000 TEUs in 1981.Thirty years later, 7.9 million 20-foot containers—almost all of themcontaining goods on their way from factories in Asia—moved through the port, a16-fold increase. Hamburg’s four container terminals loaded and unloaded 8.9million TEUs in 2012. On the long list of global container ports,Hamburg and Los Angeles are middleweights: Shanghai, the world’s largestcontainer port, moves 31 million TEUs each year.
As the idea gathered steam, it brought with it unintentional rippleeffects. Some are hard to gauge, like the environmental impact of containershipping. The boxes themselves are simply storage; the pollution involved within transporting them depends on how they’re moved. Mile for mile, transportinga single TEU using a modern container ship produces just a third of the CO2 it would take to move that same container witha truck. But the fact that containers have led to globalized production andmultiple international supply chains means that far more cargo is being movedtoday than in the days of breakbulk.
Other effects are easier to pin down, like the loss of many dockworkers’jobs and the death of waterfronts around the world as cargo moves toincreasingly automated facilities on or beyond city limits. New York is a greatcase study: Levinson estimates that in 1951, nearly 13 percent of jobs in NewYork City depended on the city’s ports. Three decades later, nearly all ofthose jobs were gone. In some cases, urban waterfronts are now being reclaimedas prettified public spaces, half a century later.
Overall, the container profoundlychanged the way we shop and work. Reliable, cheap transport made possible anexplosion in global commerce. That, in turn, had more far-reachingconsequences. When the cost of shipping American cotton to China, having itsewn into shirts there, and shipped back to Wal-Marts in the U.S. sank tonearly nothing, for example, the bottom fell out of the American textileindustry. A host of other industries followed—leading to the ongoingoutsourcing boom—as containers made geography nearly irrelevant. Americanmanufacturing—which represented nearly a quarter of U.S. GDP in 1970—makes upjust over 10 percent today.
Containers also changed the manufacturing process itself. Thereliability of containerized shipping spawned a new field in business schoolsaround the world, namely supply chain management. In the 1980s, “inventory”became a dirty word. Instead, everyone from carmakers to clothing retailersadopted a “just in time” philosophy, minimizing the time parts sat in thewarehouse before being assembled and sold.
That depended on the precise planningand efficiency that identical, interchangeable containers made possible. “WhenI started in the merchant marine, on a four-month trip to India we’d usuallycome back two months late and nobody noticed,” says Gerhardt Muller, a retiredprofessor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and author of Intermodal Freight Transportation, an industrystandard. “Now everybody jumps up and down if you’re two hours late.”
When the cost of shipping American cottonto China, having it sewn into shirts there, and shipped back to Wal-Marts inthe U.S. sank to nearly nothing, the bottom fell out of the American textileindustry.
Once shipments became predictable enough to build production and salesschedules around, managers started treating containers like warehouses inmotion. By precisely timing the arrival of components, manufacturers could moveitems from containers directly onto assembly lines or store shelves, bypassingwarehouses entirely. “In the ’80s, people realized the container wasn’t just abox for shipping,” says Muller. “Containers were no longer about shipping—theybecame about logistics.”
They may grease the wheels of global commerce, but those millions ofanonymous, identical containers also make for a very long, very vulnerablesupply chain. Experts like to talk about “resilience”—how well a system canrecover when it’s rocked by a disaster or unexpected failure. Like a precisionwatch grinding to a halt thanks to a grain of sand, small setbacks can have bigconsequences. The American power grid, for example, is notorious for its lackof resilience: A tripped generator in Ohio plunged most of the Eastern seaboardinto darkness in 2003, affecting 45 million people.
Could the same thing happen to global shipping? With the timely arrivalof each container dependent on dozens of things going right, there’s a lot thatcan go wrong. “Right now, we’ve got too many eggs in too few baskets,” saysMuller. In the U.S., two adjacent ports—Los Angeles and Long Beach—handlenearly half of the nation’s container traffic.
MIT’s Rice recently set about calculating the capacity of U.S. ports,and set up an online utility, called Port Mapper, to help operators figure outhow to respond if a port were taken out of commission. The nightmare scenario:an earthquake, a terror attack, or a labor strike in southern California. “Ifsomething bad happens in L.A. [including Long Beach], every other containerport in America would have to have approximately 25 percent extra capacity toabsorb all those containers,” Rice says. “That could not be done.” Delays asships were re-routed to ports in Canada and the Gulf Coast of the U.S. mighthold up cargo for weeks.
It’s already happened, on a small scale. In 2002, labor disputes led toa 10-day port lockout on the West Coast. Auto plants in California, accustomedto “just in time” deliveries of parts from Japan, found themselves charteringplanes to bring in parts they otherwise would have had shipped, at a cost of$600 per car. When Hurricane Katrina closed ports in and around Louisiana thathandle a significant share of America’s food imports and exports, food pricesticked up 3 percent and stayed there for six months as the system struggled toadjust. And Hurricane Sandy closed terminals in Newark and New York for days,forcing shippers to route their cargo to ports elsewhere on the East Coast.
The solution, Rice says, would be more ports operating below their peakcapability to create a buffer in case of disaster or unexpected delays. Butport operators have no interest in building inefficiency into the system,essentially paying for space and equipment they’re not using just in case of anemergency. “There’s an incentive to work at maximum capacity,” Rice says. “Youknow port operators aren’t working at 50 percent.”
Indeed, the system is getting more intricate, not less. The port of thefuture is eerily quiet and empty. At Altenwerder, there’s none of the noiseyou’d expect at a busy container port. Instead of shouting longshoremen,beeping trucks, honking horns, and growling engines, there’s just the faintsound of gentle waves against the hulls of the ships and low horns of boatsmaking their way along the Elbe.
As the Hong Kong Express takes on its Asia-bound load,the only human being nearby is a lone crane operator in a glass box 20 storiesabove the water. The crane slides on rails back and forth over the massiveship, manipulating a specially designed “spreader” claw to lift and shiftcontainer after container onto curious, truncated trucks. Seemingly nothing butwheels and chassis, the trucks are missing a key element: drivers.
It turns out Altenwerder is one of the world’s few automated portfacilities. Underneath the terminal’s blacktop, a grid of 19,000 sensors helpguide driverless robot trucks—AGVs, or “Automated Guided Vehicles”—along routesselected for maximum efficiency. The trucks are programmed to move containersfrom the shipside cranes to another set of cranes, which stack them accordingto when they’re scheduled to be picked up by trucks or loaded onto trains.“It’s all done by software,” says Karl Olaf Petters, a spokesman for HamburgerHafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), the company that runs Altenwerder and most ofHamburg’s other cargo terminals.
Ports and shipping companies are working to squeeze still moreefficiencies out of an already mature system. Beginning last year, “dual-cycle”algorithms help Altenwerder’s cranes and AGVs load and unload shipssimultaneously, reducing time in port to a minimum. The roustabouts,stevedores, and longshoremen who once populated the world’s docks and harborshave given way to engineers and computer specialists; HHLA employs more than100 people in its IT department.
The port of the future is eerily quiet and empty.
In the name of energy efficiency, the freighters of the future will makethe mighty Hong Kong Express look modest.A Danish shipper, Maersk, is at work on what it calls the “Triple-E” class. Thevessels are 1,300 feet long, and capable of carrying 18,000 containers at atime, the equivalent of 111 million pairs of sneakers—27percent more cargo than the Hong Kong Express,currently one of the largest container ships in the world. This latestgeneration of freighters, under construction now, is slated to enter servicesome time in the next year.
Andrew Curry
Muller says Maersk’s new behemoths may be pushing the envelope towardsdiminishing returns. The issue isn’t the size of ships, but the infrastructurerequired to load and unload them. Fully unloaded and laid end-to-end, the18,000 containers aboard one of Maersk’s new ships would stretch for 68 miles.That sheer volume threatens to choke even the largest ports. “Where are yougoing to put all those containers?” Muller asks. “Ships lose money when they’resitting alongside the pier. Companies are facing a tug-of-war betweenefficiency and flexibility.”
Ironically, while ports shave minutesand hours off of their operations, elsewhere the container industry is actuallyslowing down. In the past few years, container ships—the largest of which nowcarry 16,000 20-foot containers—have dropped their average speed 3 milesper hour, down to a stately 25 miles per hour, saving up to 30 percent on fuelcosts and reducing CO2 and sulfur emissions.
With nearly 20 million containers constantly in motion around the world,the humble container has become an integral part of our lives: The number of20-foot equivalent units moved is the most important measure of economicwell-being you’ve never heard of. So the next time a truck towing a metal boxedges alongside you on the freeway, give a thought to the changes it’swrought—and the possibilities that still lie in the future.
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