Container Ships
January 10, 2025 5:34 AM Subscribe
Nearly everything you own, including the clothes you're wearing and the device your're reading this on, was delivered by a container ship.
First, you have to design a container ship. Then, you have to build it. Of course, you've got to power it. Then you'll want to test it.
Now you've got to load and unload all those containers. The Chinese are really good at it. We're not.
So how do you organize all those containers? How do you secure them?
What if some get lost? What about a lot of them? Is there any way to get them back?
What's it like to work on a container ship? How are the accommodations? Is the food any good?
What are the economics of running a container ship? What is its environmental impact? And what happens when it gets thrown away?
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Suggested reading:
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson
Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything, by Rose George
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, by Pietra Rivoli
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Container ships are measured by the maximum number of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) they can transport. When you picture a big metal shipping container, that is 1 TEU.
The titleholder of largest container ship changes frequently. But as of today, it is the MSC Irina, which can transport 24,346 TEUs.
First, you have to design a container ship. Then, you have to build it. Of course, you've got to power it. Then you'll want to test it.
Now you've got to load and unload all those containers. The Chinese are really good at it. We're not.
So how do you organize all those containers? How do you secure them?
What if some get lost? What about a lot of them? Is there any way to get them back?
What's it like to work on a container ship? How are the accommodations? Is the food any good?
What are the economics of running a container ship? What is its environmental impact? And what happens when it gets thrown away?
---
Suggested reading:
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson
Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything, by Rose George
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, by Pietra Rivoli
---
Container ships are measured by the maximum number of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) they can transport. When you picture a big metal shipping container, that is 1 TEU.
The titleholder of largest container ship changes frequently. But as of today, it is the MSC Irina, which can transport 24,346 TEUs.
I thought maybe English was their second language or something. I guess technically it is.
posted by Lemkin at 5:54 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]
posted by Lemkin at 5:54 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]
They are the reason that the docks on the west side of Manhattan are now no longer taking in cargo ships, the business having moved to New Jersey. In due course, those ports will become automated at the loss of many stevedore jobs.
It will never have containers stacked above 10 or 11 levels high
In a sense, they already do. You have to start counting the containers stowed below deck.
posted by BWA at 6:09 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]
It will never have containers stacked above 10 or 11 levels high
In a sense, they already do. You have to start counting the containers stowed below deck.
posted by BWA at 6:09 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]
The Port of Los Angeles is the subject of the well-reviewed The Docks, by Bill Sharpsteen.
posted by Lemkin at 6:13 AM on January 10
posted by Lemkin at 6:13 AM on January 10
Edward Burtynsky has some very lovely and slightly terrifying photos of shipbreaking.
posted by PussKillian at 6:43 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]
posted by PussKillian at 6:43 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]
The container stacks below deck are resting on the floor of the cargo hold. The ones above deck are stacked on the hatch covers, which distribute the weight to the hull sides and the bulkheads. So it's really two separate stacks, one above the other.
Leaving out bridge visibility and crane height, the limits on stacking are dictated by the strength of the containers. The container on the bottom has to support the weight of all the ones on top, and the stack has to hold together even when the ship is being rolled around in a rough sea.
What may not obvious from looking at a fully loaded ship is that each container is only attached to the one below. So when you see a fully loaded ship you're really looking at hundreds of individual towers of containers.
Each container is locked to the one below by twist locks at each corner. When the ship starts rolling in a rough sea, those twist locks are all that's holding the stack together in the upper levels. The lower two or three levels will have some additional support via diagonal lashings to the deck.
So there's a lot of calculation that goes into ensuring that the load is sufficiently stable, but in sufficiently bad weather it can all still fall over.
posted by automatronic at 6:45 AM on January 10 [7 favorites]
Leaving out bridge visibility and crane height, the limits on stacking are dictated by the strength of the containers. The container on the bottom has to support the weight of all the ones on top, and the stack has to hold together even when the ship is being rolled around in a rough sea.
What may not obvious from looking at a fully loaded ship is that each container is only attached to the one below. So when you see a fully loaded ship you're really looking at hundreds of individual towers of containers.
Each container is locked to the one below by twist locks at each corner. When the ship starts rolling in a rough sea, those twist locks are all that's holding the stack together in the upper levels. The lower two or three levels will have some additional support via diagonal lashings to the deck.
So there's a lot of calculation that goes into ensuring that the load is sufficiently stable, but in sufficiently bad weather it can all still fall over.
posted by automatronic at 6:45 AM on January 10 [7 favorites]
Mod note: Hi! The final link and sentence of the post has been removed has been removed, as it was largely AI content, which the site discourages.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:58 AM on January 10 [4 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:58 AM on January 10 [4 favorites]
a lot of my career was dealing with these ships in one way or another. at first i worked in R&D developing the antifouling paint for these types of ships (the red paint you see on the bottom half), like Triple-E's and the like. i would also attend applications and hull inspections in China, Singapore and South Korea. I have been to DSME and other shipyards, and the scale of the sites, cranes and ships are not to be believed. simply incredible, and more so when you are walking under all that steel inspecting the hull in the drydock. later i worked for a shipping company that had many of these container ships and we found out how vulnerable, and resilient, the shipping industry was when the notpetya malware attack happened.
posted by alchemist at 7:02 AM on January 10 [10 favorites]
posted by alchemist at 7:02 AM on January 10 [10 favorites]
The final link and sentence of the post has been removed has been removed, as it was largely AI content, which the site discourages.
[head hung in shame]
posted by Lemkin at 7:07 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]
[head hung in shame]
posted by Lemkin at 7:07 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]
What's Going On With Shipping has been reporting on shipping news ever since the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal a few years ago.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:09 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:09 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]
Related: Logistics, officially the world's longest film. Running 51,420 minutes (857 hours AKA 35 days AKA 5 weeks) in length, the film follows the production cycle of a pedometer in reverse chronological order, and the reason the film is so very, very long is that it travels by sea on a container ship. For the terminally curious, the whole thing is now on YouTube in 107 videos.
posted by foxtongue at 7:16 AM on January 10 [6 favorites]
posted by foxtongue at 7:16 AM on January 10 [6 favorites]
A lot of good links here but I particularly liked the US-centric one about how bad US ports are (the "We're not" link in the third line).
Philly is 55 in the world in terms of efficiency, NY is 92. Those are the only 2 US ports in the top 100. LA is 373, even though it's 9th in the world in terms of volume. Six of the bottom 50 least efficient ports are in the US.
Turns out one big reason is automation. Automation increases efficiency, but costs people jobs. The dollars lost in wasted efficiency almost certain surpass the dollars spent on salary, and as established in the post, shipping is kind of a big deal that effects everybody, so this seems like an overall good problem to solve with automation, but you can't just take away jobs from people without giving them something in return. This seems like a hard but relevant problem for the coming age.
posted by grog at 7:56 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]
Philly is 55 in the world in terms of efficiency, NY is 92. Those are the only 2 US ports in the top 100. LA is 373, even though it's 9th in the world in terms of volume. Six of the bottom 50 least efficient ports are in the US.
Turns out one big reason is automation. Automation increases efficiency, but costs people jobs. The dollars lost in wasted efficiency almost certain surpass the dollars spent on salary, and as established in the post, shipping is kind of a big deal that effects everybody, so this seems like an overall good problem to solve with automation, but you can't just take away jobs from people without giving them something in return. This seems like a hard but relevant problem for the coming age.
posted by grog at 7:56 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]
The ILA has a rebuttal to those statistics, since US Ports do a lot more, they are slower, but more reliable. So the ILA would like you to know the reliability stats.
Of course, "automation" is always favored by finance, who just want numbers, and numbers, at any cost, no matter how meaningless the numbers are.
"Automation" in the offshore oil industry, for example, was an excuse to dump 2,700 dead wells and platforms in the ocean. Their legal liabilities for cleanup didn't go away, but they no longer had the workforce to to the cleanup, due to "automation", cleanup was made "unfeasible" in order to juice profits.
posted by eustatic at 8:19 AM on January 10 [6 favorites]
Of course, "automation" is always favored by finance, who just want numbers, and numbers, at any cost, no matter how meaningless the numbers are.
"Automation" in the offshore oil industry, for example, was an excuse to dump 2,700 dead wells and platforms in the ocean. Their legal liabilities for cleanup didn't go away, but they no longer had the workforce to to the cleanup, due to "automation", cleanup was made "unfeasible" in order to juice profits.
posted by eustatic at 8:19 AM on January 10 [6 favorites]
I mean, the US does high high volumes with infrastructure from 1930 (if not 1830)
I imagine the World Bank report is going to favor ports that it funded in the 60's through the nineties.
The lack of working infrastructure seems to be a much bigger component for the ship turnover problem in the USA than "lack of automation" aka, our workforce makes"too much money" And has "too many skills"
posted by eustatic at 8:26 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]
I imagine the World Bank report is going to favor ports that it funded in the 60's through the nineties.
The lack of working infrastructure seems to be a much bigger component for the ship turnover problem in the USA than "lack of automation" aka, our workforce makes"too much money" And has "too many skills"
posted by eustatic at 8:26 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]
Well, it was either infrastructure or the Afghanistan War, so… you know… priorities.
posted by Lemkin at 8:43 AM on January 10
posted by Lemkin at 8:43 AM on January 10
Great set of info! (with apparently some AI junk mixed in). That is an unfortunately reflection of the internet these days.
One minor correction in the comments above. A TEU is a twenty foot equivalent. Most of the containers you see are forty footers. Sometimes called 2TEU (and counted as such) or FEU. Considering the global nature of the container market. I find it funny that we use imperial measurements for everything global. Note that many domestic containers you see are actually 53 feet, which is the max you can put on a truck on a US highway.
Related to the efficiency numbers above I think a huge drag in Los Angeles is the surprising high percentage of containers that leave via truck. Lots congestion getting 40 foot containers on to trucks that take them to warehouses where they are sorted and repacked to 53 footers to go out to Walmarts and Best Buys across the nation. The US rail industry is very efficient at moving double stack containers from San Bernardino to Chicago and Dallas
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:57 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]
One minor correction in the comments above. A TEU is a twenty foot equivalent. Most of the containers you see are forty footers. Sometimes called 2TEU (and counted as such) or FEU. Considering the global nature of the container market. I find it funny that we use imperial measurements for everything global. Note that many domestic containers you see are actually 53 feet, which is the max you can put on a truck on a US highway.
Related to the efficiency numbers above I think a huge drag in Los Angeles is the surprising high percentage of containers that leave via truck. Lots congestion getting 40 foot containers on to trucks that take them to warehouses where they are sorted and repacked to 53 footers to go out to Walmarts and Best Buys across the nation. The US rail industry is very efficient at moving double stack containers from San Bernardino to Chicago and Dallas
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:57 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]
A TEU is a twenty foot equivalent. Most of the containers you see are forty footers.
I was wondering about that.
In terms of ones people might have been likely to see in person, I figured 20.
The one Riggs drops on that South African goon at the end of Lethal Weapon 2, that seemed like a 40.
posted by Lemkin at 9:19 AM on January 10
I was wondering about that.
In terms of ones people might have been likely to see in person, I figured 20.
The one Riggs drops on that South African goon at the end of Lethal Weapon 2, that seemed like a 40.
posted by Lemkin at 9:19 AM on January 10
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That entire site is AI slop. The page is flowery prose with zero information content, and the image is either AI-generated or a bad photoshop, showing an unmarked MSC ship with containers stacked up to 20 layers high above deck level.
There is no shortage of real photos of the MSC Irina, for instance here on ShipSpotting.
The real ship has the name painted on both sides the bow, the MSC logo the right way round at the prow, and "MSC" in giant letters on the side of the hull.
It will never have containers stacked above 10 or 11 levels high, both because port cranes don't reach that high, and because doing so would block the view from the bridge.
posted by automatronic at 5:50 AM on January 10 [11 favorites]