Container Ships

January 10, 2025 5:34 AM

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.

posted by Lemkin (32 comments total)

look at the size of that thing

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 [20 favorites]

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]

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]

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

Edward Burtynsky has some very lovely and slightly terrifying photos of shipbreaking.
posted by PussKillian at 6:43 AM on January 10 [4 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 [12 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 [9 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 [13 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 [3 favorites]

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 [4 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 [7 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 [4 favorites]

MetaFilter: a hard but relevant problem for the coming age
posted by Lemkin at 8:18 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]

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 [10 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 [5 favorites]

Well, it was either infrastructure or the Afghanistan War, so… you know… priorities.
posted by Lemkin at 8:43 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]

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 [8 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

There's a great podcast, a bit dated now, called "Containers", by Alexis Madrigal, about the development of container shipping and its impacts on the local community around the Port of Oakland. Definitely recommended if you can find it.
posted by suelac at 10:12 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]

If you want to get meta, there’s always the Marlin class of heavy lift ships, famous as “ship-shipping ships shipping shipping ships.”
posted by TedW at 10:59 AM on January 10 [4 favorites]

When you picture a big metal shipping container, that is 1 TEU.

Not I. The vast majority of containers at the Port of Seattle appear to be 40-foot containers, equivalent to 2 TEU. There are definitely 20-foot containers around there but they seem vastly out-numbered by 40-foot containers.
posted by mhum at 11:03 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]

Crazy idea: maybe we just need less stuff
posted by birdsongster at 11:19 AM on January 10 [4 favorites]

This post is about container ships, but of course that is only part of the story of containers. Before and after traveling by ship, they are loaded at factories and then transported by truck or rail to ports. After being unloaded at destination ports, they travel again by truck or rail to where their merchandise is going — distribution centers, factories, etc. During those legs of their journey, they are often unattended, in the dark, on stretches of railroad or in parking lots, and subject to break-ins and looting. As well, they are potential conduits for smuggling things, up to and including dirty bombs.

After 9/11, this last vulnerability became a concern for US Homeland Security, so there are multiple layers of potential inspection including seal checks, x-ray scans, opening and unloading, etc. A person I know spent several years after 9/11 working on a startup that was developing a black box that could be built cheaply, inserted into containers at the point of origination, that would work like an airplane black box, recording every location, every motion, every intrusion including holes cut into the side, any evidence of radiation, any opening of the doors prior to the final destination, etc.

You would think that Walmart, alone, with its volume of shipping, would be interested in such a device to cut down on pilferage, but this whole notion never got traction. On the smuggling/dirty bomb danger end of things, the existing regimen of customs checks seems to have done the job. And while a black box could some record details of pilferage from parked containers, it would do little to discourage the practice or apprehend culprits. So 23 years on, containers travel without black boxes, and we continue to keep our fingers crossed about their security risks.
posted by beagle at 11:40 AM on January 10 [5 favorites]

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 yt at the loss of many stevedore jobs.

The vast, vast majority of dockworker jobs have already gone just from containerisation. It's hasn't been a mass employment sector for many years. Any city that depended on the docks for a significant chunk of its employment had a very hard time recovering (in the UK the obvious example is Liverpool)
posted by plonkee at 11:46 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]

Is this the appropriate post for me to break in with "actually, the 2nd season of the Wire was fantastic..."?

Jokes aside, I live in West Seattle and work in SODO (a neighborhood just south of downtown, right across from the port), and I bike and drive past the port facilities often. I don't get tired of it. They're just so visually impressive.

I work with a guy who knows a crane operator in one of the giant cargo cranes that load and unload the boats. He (my coworker) told me that it takes so long for the crane operators to get up and down the ladders that they are not allowed bathroom breaks. Instead they carry a bucket with them.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:57 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]

Any estimate as to how many containers are sitting on the bottom of the oceans?
posted by Thorzdad at 1:47 PM on January 10

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.

I wouldn't trust s fucking thing from the ILA as long as it's run by their trumper gangster Harold Daggett.
posted by 2N2222 at 3:30 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Any estimate as to how many containers are sitting on the bottom of the oceans?

Tens of thousands.

There's usually between a few hundred and a couple thousand lost per year; the World Shipping Council's 2024 report has a graph with statistics of known losses since 2008.

The worst year was 2013 with 5,578 containers lost, most of which were on the MOL Comfort when it broke up off Yemen. Recently the numbers have been getting better: last year there were only 221 lost, of which 33% were recovered.

The ones that go to the bottom aren't the only problem. Containers can be well sealed, and contain a lot of air, so they can end up floating for weeks or months, barely visible with only inches out of the water. If you run into one at night in a small boat you can suddenly have a very big problem.
posted by automatronic at 3:38 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]

I know we.lost a few in the Mississippi River, during an allision. One was being used to transport plastic nurdles, so some millions and millions of nurdles were spilled into the river and the ocean.

What is interesting is where the video and the ILA agree, that the USA will never be on the top of the list, because the top of the list will be transhipment ports that don't do intermodal---no trucks.

So, yr port will do better in these stats the fewer trucks are involved. Which seems like it s designed to hate on Long Beach. Houston and New Orleans are not that low, neither is New York.

What s the union on Long Beach? What do they say?
posted by eustatic at 4:44 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Yeah, hygiene and safety are the reason for the development of remote operated gantry cranes (the Chinese link in the OPP). Those things are freaking high. They have lifts, but malfunctions happen and oops, a long way down. (I still maintain the operator faked it to troll us tourists.)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:05 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]

My employer, a large non-asset owning logistics firm (that is, we don't own any ships or planes, but we put freight on them) has a "cargo signal" department that puts tracking devices on containers. I think they're only placed on domestic shipments, so we track trucks after they leave ports or distribution warehouses. Not sure how much business we do there, but there is a market for at least part of the journey.

As for lost and damaged containers, the ship-owners only have a small liability per container, so insurance is another big line of business in the logistics industry. Items lost at sea have been a boon to ocean scientists.
posted by lhauser at 8:33 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]

Certainly everything in my house, except the few things we carried in our luggage, came off a container ship. Moving trucks don’t do well with 220+ miles of ocean!
posted by billsaysthis at 11:06 PM on January 11