1. Shipping is the ‘greenest’ method of transportation, as mentioned in the Maersk stories; “a container on our Maersk Triple-E line” since it releases only 3g of Co2 per container versus an airplane which emits around 560g of Co2 per ton.
2. Shipping was re-invented by Malcolm Mclean in the early 1950’s. The construction of the shipping containers by use of metal was to replace the break-bulk method formerly used for transportation of the goods. He later founded the ‘Sea-Land Service’, which further augmented his business.
3. At present, there are over 17 million shipping containers globally, and five or six million are currently transported worldwide, on shipping vessels, trucks and trains. It is estimated that they make around 200 million trips a year in total.
4. New shipping containers are exported from China, it being the largest exporter of new shipping containers.
5. The lifespan of a container is over 20 years plus, on average, if it is well maintained.
6. The concept of Re-purposing or Re-deploying shipping containers as workspaces and homes is believed to conserve a lot of energy, which may otherwise have been expended on melting them for reuse as scrap.
7. Many cities, such as, London, Mumbai, to name a couple, use shipping containers as an easy and cost effective way of providing pre-fab housing. Re-purposed containers have also been effectively used in Berlin, for housing students, and, more recently for housing the asylum seekers.
8. The process of containerisation has enabled, to bring down the cost of transportation (from Asia to Europe) of electronic goods such as a DVD player to just about 0.8%, and that of a typical TV set to about 1.4% of their final prices to the customer.
9. The biggest container ship in the world today is five times bigger than an Airbus A380. It can transport more than 16,000 containers on each journey.
10. Each container is allocated with its own unique unit number, which is referred to as a box number which can be used by the ships- captains, the crews, the cost guards, the dock supervisors, the customs officers and the warehouse- managers. The box number tells them about the owner of the container, and also about details of the client using the container for shipping their goods. It also helps them to keep a track of the whereabouts of the container during the course of its journey in the world.
