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When Shipping Containers Sink in the Drink
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When Shipping Containers Sink in the Drink

We’ve supersized our capacity to ship stuff across the seas. As our global supply chains grow, what can we gather from the junk that washes up on shore?

Kathryn Schulz
The New Yorker, 2022
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Thousands of cargo ships sail the world’s oceans at any given moment. They ferry cheap goods manufactured in far-flung places and packed into large containers to satisfy consumers’ enormous appetite for disposable products. While only a small fraction of these containers end up in the ocean due to storms or accidents, as Kathryn Schulz reports for The New Yorker, their impact on the environment can be significant. Currently, few enforceable regulations mitigate the shipping industry’s negligence. Lost containers’ ocean-going detritus does have one upside: It helps oceanographers better understand currents.

Summary

Modern cargo shipping methods date to the 1950s.

In February 1997, the Tokio Express cargo ship lost 62 shipping containers off the United Kingdom’s western coast. One container was filled with 4,756,940 Lego pieces. Even today, Legos still wash up on the Cornwall shore, in “southwestern England — to Portwrinkle and Perranporth, to Bigbury Bay and Gunwalloe.”

While ships have been losing cargo at sea for millennia, “container loss” – which can refer to the loss of containers that go overboard in various calamities, from pirate raids to shipwrecks to stormy seas – dates to the 1950s. That’s when enterprising businessman Malcolm McLean invented a new shipping process using containers of uniform size – eight feet wide, 8.5 feet tall and either 20 or 40 feet long – to move merchandise on retrofitted naval vessels.He wanted to reduce the labor cost of loading and unloading cargo in port, which accounts for almost 75% of all shipping costs.

Longshoremen who’d been making their living working the docks for centuries saw the writing on the wall: Automation took their jobs. Massive cranes now load easily-stacked aluminum...

About the Author

The New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award, and wrote the memoir, Lost & Found.

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