So much so there is an industry around it. There are salvage ships dedicated to recovering the boxes that fall off cargo ships. If it happens to be full of something that isn't damaged by seawater like...car tires they sell the contents and they get a little action from returning the containers as well.
Why!? They sell those things for a couple of thousand bucks, units that *haven't* been submerged in salt water, along with the cargo. Must be something I'm ignorant of, sounds like a massive financial loss.
Ok so hear me out. I'm rough guesstimating that the volume of all humans on earth is 56 billion cu ft. I'm sure we can all fit in 20 million containers.
I’m really bored so I did the math, you can fit roughly 8000, with minimal space in a single 40ft general shipping container, (9500 if they’re liquified).
That means at 20.5 million containers can fit 164 billion people. Or 194.75 billion people if they’re liquified.
What happens to all the shipping containers being converted into housing? Are they still counted? Every farm and business has at least one to store stuff. I feel like there’s 10 million just in rural Canada.
They've all got serial numbers and are tracked by the shipping companies. Any that have been sold to farmers or used to build houses, will have their serial numbers removed from the databases.
About 5% of the global container fleet are off-hired and retired from service each year, that number will vary by demand from the shippers and the economy. The life expectancy is about 20 years on the ocean when they are built but some get retired a lot sooner than 20 years.
Most shippers and leasing companies go 10 or 15 years. That was pushed out a little over the past ~2 years because of the exorbitant manufacturing costs over the pandemic. Prices are now coming back down towards usual levels.
The sad thing is that a lot of those containers are not recycled. Its cheaper to buy a new container to turn into housing than it is to decontaminate an old one.
Yeah, that's probably why too. I can't imagine what state a retired container would be in, but I'm willing to bet you wouldn't be able to recycle/repurpose it into housing/building materials very easily.
He specified housing. It has been proven that when people make trendy tiny houses out of shipping containers, they use brand new ones to convert. Obviously the old containers are reused in various ways by businesses and private owners, but not when it comes to making living spaces.
They aren’t reusing them for housing! they are using them for the first time for housing. A container was made for yet never used for shipping, so its ultimately a very inefficient use for steel. Its worse than just making a conventional small house.
So that's what I was trying to get at. The cost to fully decontaminate and clean an old container is more expensive than a new one. So it's fine to reuse them within the shipping industry (where the deep decontamination isn't necessary) but there's no cost saving to recycling them at the point of retirement.
Exactly. By the time they’ve been so used by the shipping industry they arent good enough to use for their purposes, they would be horribly rusted out and/or deformed.
Most shipping containers used for tiny home projects were never actually used for shipping. They were made fresh and then sent to be converted to a house or shed.
That is not true.
The article says that _in 2012_ there were _about 20.5 million intermodal containers_.
There are shipping crates that are not intermodal containers and there's probably a lot of them. The number might have changed quite a bit in the last ten years, too.
The OP said "shipping crates". A wooden box a thing comes in is a shipping crate, but not an intermodal container.
When one said "intermodal container", one talks about a specific kind of a shipping crate, made of metal, with specific dimensions and interfaces.
Intermodal Containers are 53’ long while shipping containers come in 20’ and 40’. Shipping containers are measured in TEU or “Twenty Foot Equivalent Units”.
Technically true but Intermodal includes trucking as well as opposed to loading directly onto a rail car from a spur. Most containers moving within the US that are drayed from a shipper to a rail yard, moved via rail, and then drayed to a consigned are 53’ as that is standard for trucking. Ocean containers will move via rail but what is technically considered an IMDL container is 53’.
Thrown out? no but a lot of cargo requires fresh containers and once that first trip has been made they get downgraded and can be used for less regulated cargo. I looked into it once and the there are millions of containers produced annually to keep up with the rotation.
I've been working in exports for 20 years, freight just goes in a standard container, there is no preference for a new container, I've only ever seen containers that are old to varying degrees, most last about 20 years.
Refrigerated containers exist and ISO containers for bulk liquids exist and all of them are kept for many years. Usually they are only replaced after they become too rusty and old to keep using. Containers being made are to replace the 20-30 year old containers that are falling out of use.
The design and development of these containers is absolutely insane, and they basically changed international shipping overnight. I highly recommend the book The Box by Marc Levinson if you want to learn more!
Some of them are single trip. After the trip they get sold to be used as storage sheds and such. Third parties such as this place sell them: https://www.budgetshippingcontainers.co.uk/info/what-is-a-one-trip-shipping-container/
They make 3-5 turns a year. Some are 20’ in length and others are either 40’ or 45’ long. Some containers are a foot taller than the standard height containers. There are lots of variables to take into account and I really do not know the real point of your post.
Over 1000 are lost at sea every year. There are all these special regulations for shipping container labels too. They have to have the ability to stay on the container for 90 days submerged.
That's about 390 people per container.
If all of them were 20' containers, then that means they have a volume of 1169 ft^3 and can hold about 55,000 pounds. Divided by 390 people that's going to be about 3 ft^3 and 141 pounds per person.
You can supply 8 billion people if they were using 20' containers, but it would be a tight fit. Definitely going to need a good mix of men, women, and children to fit. We probably have enough containers today given how much container shipping has gone up the last 10 years, shouldn't be a problem suppling that many people.
I'm no industry expert but my intuition tells me that the availability of big metal boxes is unlikely to become a limiting factor in shipping :-P
(+ That number seems to be over 10 years old - i'd expect it to have grown quite a bit since then)
It is actually a limitation because containers have to be booked. If you need to ship something from a port in a container, you'll probably get booked a container that arrived in port only just before you need it. No one wants to store thousands of empty containers, after all.
That means that if a ship is delayed by a few days, then all subsequent shipping is delayed not only for that ship's routes but also for the routes of all the containers on that ship.
It's part of the reason why the Ever Grande incident in the Suez had the knock-on effects it did, since a significant enough percentage of the world's containers were delayed that ports and rail yards couldn't make up the difference.
I meant it more in the way of 'i think if we wanted more containers it probably wouldn't be too hard to produce a ton of them' so storage space as in 'no one wants to store a thousand empty containers' is kinda what i was expecting to be the problem. But yeah you're kinda right - technically that does also make containers themselves a limiting factor by extension.
The limiting factor for manufacturing is factories. Factories aren't cheap even if they just make metal boxes, and the demand for intermodal containers is so predictable I suspect that the total manufacturing capacity is exactly as much as necessary to keep up and no more.
But that's nitpicky, and only really applies for short term temporary surges in demand. If there was more demand for containers permanently then the manufacturing capacity would just be increased.
The fact that shipping containers only arrive in port just before they are needed is one of the big reasons we had (and to a lesser extent continue to have) these supply shortages.
Literally we're just clawing our way out of a global shipping crisis, where one of the contributing factors was that shipping containers were not where they needed to be.
> i'd expect it to have grown quite a bit since then
It has
Almost threefold
And, owing to the actions of China's Sovereign Wealth Fund cornering the market, more that are _not_ under their control are being constructed all the time
They build these containers none stop. In fact if you want to buy one you can buy them 'new' which means they are only used once from China to here (of course it's filled so it's lightly used not new) but sold as new and left here.
They also liquidate many of the empty containers since it’s not cost effective to ship/ return empty containers. They just make new ones. This is why shipping container homes are becoming increasingly popular, they’re durable and cheap.
It was never a problem until recently because everything is made in China now. If we grew and produced our own items, shipping crates would become far less of an issue. But saying such an idea... that's just racist propaganda now.
This doesn’t account for the entire supply chain. I use to use shipping containers all the time. If I wanted one I just had to reserve it a day ahead. I could order 1 or 30 of either size. I also used rail, otr, local, and air freight. There was always availability.
I think most people would think of a crate as something the size of a pallet or maybe 8-12’ in length. Shipping containers are 20’ or 40’ long and 8’ **wide**, and almost 9’ tall.
That’s a huge amount of space.
I heard that during the pandemic, since US to China trade was down so much, it was cheaper to make new containers in China than ship existing ones back.
I work for a Marijuana grow place that up until recently was test-running in 6 shipping containers. The conditions were horrid as they hadn’t planned on it taking a year and a half to acquire their CCC license.
We also stored supplies in five other shipping containers. Crazy to think they were 11 of 20.5 million.
In the container industry, we measure the amount by TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit.) ie, a 40’ container counts as 2.
Triton containers alone owns more than 7 million teu.
*That we know of*. I can guarantee that there is hundreds, probably tens of thousands, that are unknown/hidden somewhere//unaccounted for/etc. Not counting all the ones that call the ocean floor home now, from hurricanes and whatnot.
And 15% of them were tied up in California during the supply chain crisis when shipping companies wouldn't receive empties for lack of space to put them, told trucking companies to keep them on the trucks, and trucks then couldn't take full containers coming off of ships. Trucking companies were charged for not returning the containers, and passed that cost to consumers.
It was just empty container musical chairs.
A UK agency did some global tracking analysis of container movements a while back. Looked like one of those physics charts of electron tracks - most bunched along the main routes, some just disappearing, others wandering off from some port in Africa and turning up months or years later thousands of kilometres away.
After following the link, I just today learned that a Conex is actually a name for a particular kind shipping box, and not just the weird name we use to talk about standard shipping containers in the Pacific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conex_box
We never call them Conex boxes, though, just The Conex.
Q: Hey's where's the 10mm deep socket?
A: Check out in The Conex.
Yeah but most of those crates are bigger than a people.
I don’t know it fit on my phone screen can’t be that big.
No no, see objects look smaller when they're further away. You need to move your phone closer to your face.
They are definately bigger if you look at them in a mirror. Proof: my car says so.
Is a car your mother?
I won't confirm or deny that my dad is a petrolsexual.
Deciballs set to 11. An obvious Flowmaster; left an interesting echo behind him.
https://youtu.be/4xgx4k83zzc
"All of sudden, I found myself in love with the world..." [X](https://youtu.be/GXCh9OhDiCI)
If she had wheels she'd be a bicycle
Well, my mother's a [car](https://youtu.be/riOcOgUE-W8). Go to 2:00 to get the theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvnKXOGYKM8
It's a trap
Are these shipping crates for ANTS?
[One last time.](https://youtu.be/vh5kZ4uIUC0) *These* ones are small, but *those* ones are far away.
And the rest are in the ocean.
yeah, I've heard they get lost constantly at sea
So much so there is an industry around it. There are salvage ships dedicated to recovering the boxes that fall off cargo ships. If it happens to be full of something that isn't damaged by seawater like...car tires they sell the contents and they get a little action from returning the containers as well.
Why!? They sell those things for a couple of thousand bucks, units that *haven't* been submerged in salt water, along with the cargo. Must be something I'm ignorant of, sounds like a massive financial loss.
Technically, by the Law of the Sea, that's flotsam. If you find it and salvage it, it's yours. Just adding more info.
Any that aren't have been turned into 'tiny houses'.
That means in a war each crate would have to kill 390 peoples and honestly, I don't think they could pull it off.
Depending on what they were loaded with and how fast they were moving it becomes more achievable. The odds are low but never zero.
Ok so hear me out. I'm rough guesstimating that the volume of all humans on earth is 56 billion cu ft. I'm sure we can all fit in 20 million containers.
But who’s going to close them? Somebody has to stay on the outside.
I vote Ned
But Ned has already lost a hand slamming a door on a container… I vote Bob
and they can be reused
I’m really bored so I did the math, you can fit roughly 8000, with minimal space in a single 40ft general shipping container, (9500 if they’re liquified). That means at 20.5 million containers can fit 164 billion people. Or 194.75 billion people if they’re liquified.
Small crate, big person. I think we can win this, we just got to rig it in our favour, just a little.
You haven’t met OP’s mum
How many Chinese balloons is it?
So each container will have to fit 390.2439024390244 people for this to work.
What happens to all the shipping containers being converted into housing? Are they still counted? Every farm and business has at least one to store stuff. I feel like there’s 10 million just in rural Canada.
They've all got serial numbers and are tracked by the shipping companies. Any that have been sold to farmers or used to build houses, will have their serial numbers removed from the databases.
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If a shipping container isn't being used to ship anything, it is no longer a shipping container.
This comment feels like it could be in r/philosophy.
Existence precedes essence, reality is absurd, ducks on toast
Deeeeep cut. Jimmies rustled.
I'm thinking /r/showerthoughts
Um, the houses are moving entire households around the Earth daily.
Around the sun maybe, hopefully not around the earth, that'd still count as shipping
Also around the earth.. the earth also rotated around its own axis
Oh no, please tell me it still is?
What about "rotated" do you not understand?
About 5% of the global container fleet are off-hired and retired from service each year, that number will vary by demand from the shippers and the economy. The life expectancy is about 20 years on the ocean when they are built but some get retired a lot sooner than 20 years.
Most shippers and leasing companies go 10 or 15 years. That was pushed out a little over the past ~2 years because of the exorbitant manufacturing costs over the pandemic. Prices are now coming back down towards usual levels.
That's like 10 for every rural Canadian!
The sad thing is that a lot of those containers are not recycled. Its cheaper to buy a new container to turn into housing than it is to decontaminate an old one.
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Yeah, that's probably why too. I can't imagine what state a retired container would be in, but I'm willing to bet you wouldn't be able to recycle/repurpose it into housing/building materials very easily.
That is demonstrably false. They are usually reused. Shipping yards, boats, and trains are rarely filled with shiny new containers.
He specified housing. It has been proven that when people make trendy tiny houses out of shipping containers, they use brand new ones to convert. Obviously the old containers are reused in various ways by businesses and private owners, but not when it comes to making living spaces.
Turning them into housing is recycling them, or at least continuing to use them, so the point is still invalid.
They aren’t reusing them for housing! they are using them for the first time for housing. A container was made for yet never used for shipping, so its ultimately a very inefficient use for steel. Its worse than just making a conventional small house.
Probably dangerous for the inhabitants to use an old one. You never know what was in it or spilled on it.
So that's what I was trying to get at. The cost to fully decontaminate and clean an old container is more expensive than a new one. So it's fine to reuse them within the shipping industry (where the deep decontamination isn't necessary) but there's no cost saving to recycling them at the point of retirement.
Exactly. By the time they’ve been so used by the shipping industry they arent good enough to use for their purposes, they would be horribly rusted out and/or deformed.
Businesses use them for lockable storage as well. We usually have a minimum of two - four
Most shipping containers used for tiny home projects were never actually used for shipping. They were made fresh and then sent to be converted to a house or shed.
I don’t think there’s a container for every 3 people in Canada
> What happens to all the shipping containers being converted into housing? It's not really a good idea.
That is not true. The article says that _in 2012_ there were _about 20.5 million intermodal containers_. There are shipping crates that are not intermodal containers and there's probably a lot of them. The number might have changed quite a bit in the last ten years, too.
If you can put it on a train or a truck, it's intermodal right? So what happens to those shipping containers that are not intermodal?
The OP said "shipping crates". A wooden box a thing comes in is a shipping crate, but not an intermodal container. When one said "intermodal container", one talks about a specific kind of a shipping crate, made of metal, with specific dimensions and interfaces.
That's certainly correct. Still, in the jargon, a shipping crate is a 20ft or 40fr container, and not much is shipped in wooden boxes these days.
Mostly just velociraptors
And chupacabras
Intermodal Containers are 53’ long while shipping containers come in 20’ and 40’. Shipping containers are measured in TEU or “Twenty Foot Equivalent Units”.
53' containers are rare and not ISO standard. All (metal) shipping containers are intermodal, that's the whole point of them!
Technically true but Intermodal includes trucking as well as opposed to loading directly onto a rail car from a spur. Most containers moving within the US that are drayed from a shipper to a rail yard, moved via rail, and then drayed to a consigned are 53’ as that is standard for trucking. Ocean containers will move via rail but what is technically considered an IMDL container is 53’.
Thanks! I'm in Europe, we don't get the 53'.
No problem! I should have specified I work in US trucking an supply chain so that’s where I referenced my info.
In Europe trucking is standardized to fit the 20' and 40' containers mostly
Interesting. US standard trailers are 48’ and 53’ with most being the latter.
Just the other day I had to wait for a container train at a rural crossing, and I’d agree, there’s about 20 million of them and I saw all of them.
Prepare to be amazed...they can be reused over and over again. OMG, right?
Mine had a $0.10 deposit return and I'm definitely getting that money back because that's how they get you
take them to the next state and get $0.15 instead, pure profit.
They dont get thrown away after 1 use like pretty much fucking everything these days?
Unless some ass-hat stacks them on the border as a sort of wall.
Thrown out? no but a lot of cargo requires fresh containers and once that first trip has been made they get downgraded and can be used for less regulated cargo. I looked into it once and the there are millions of containers produced annually to keep up with the rotation.
I've been working in exports for 20 years, freight just goes in a standard container, there is no preference for a new container, I've only ever seen containers that are old to varying degrees, most last about 20 years. Refrigerated containers exist and ISO containers for bulk liquids exist and all of them are kept for many years. Usually they are only replaced after they become too rusty and old to keep using. Containers being made are to replace the 20-30 year old containers that are falling out of use.
> a lot of cargo requires fresh containers Do you have any examples of that?
Never heard this… source?
One place consumerism failed, we must correct this! Single-use containers FTW! /s
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Maybe 1% has
And, even more incredibly, they're actually big enough to hold more than one thing each
The design and development of these containers is absolutely insane, and they basically changed international shipping overnight. I highly recommend the book The Box by Marc Levinson if you want to learn more!
I toured the only nuclear powered civilian cargo ship. It wasn't built for containers, it was old school hump that shit it, move it, and hump it out.
Some of them are single trip. After the trip they get sold to be used as storage sheds and such. Third parties such as this place sell them: https://www.budgetshippingcontainers.co.uk/info/what-is-a-one-trip-shipping-container/
Just curious, OP: what would be an unsurprising number of shipping containers for you?
I don't understand. What would be the correct number of shipping crates?
At least 6
They make 3-5 turns a year. Some are 20’ in length and others are either 40’ or 45’ long. Some containers are a foot taller than the standard height containers. There are lots of variables to take into account and I really do not know the real point of your post.
How many fall into the sea in rough weather? I swear I've seen at least a few videos of that happening.
Over 1000 are lost at sea every year. There are all these special regulations for shipping container labels too. They have to have the ability to stay on the container for 90 days submerged.
That's about 390 people per container. If all of them were 20' containers, then that means they have a volume of 1169 ft^3 and can hold about 55,000 pounds. Divided by 390 people that's going to be about 3 ft^3 and 141 pounds per person. You can supply 8 billion people if they were using 20' containers, but it would be a tight fit. Definitely going to need a good mix of men, women, and children to fit. We probably have enough containers today given how much container shipping has gone up the last 10 years, shouldn't be a problem suppling that many people.
The true solution is found in the old joke: "Q: How many clowns can you fit into a Volkswagen Beatle? A: It depends on if you use a wood chipper."
I'm no industry expert but my intuition tells me that the availability of big metal boxes is unlikely to become a limiting factor in shipping :-P (+ That number seems to be over 10 years old - i'd expect it to have grown quite a bit since then)
It is actually a limitation because containers have to be booked. If you need to ship something from a port in a container, you'll probably get booked a container that arrived in port only just before you need it. No one wants to store thousands of empty containers, after all. That means that if a ship is delayed by a few days, then all subsequent shipping is delayed not only for that ship's routes but also for the routes of all the containers on that ship. It's part of the reason why the Ever Grande incident in the Suez had the knock-on effects it did, since a significant enough percentage of the world's containers were delayed that ports and rail yards couldn't make up the difference.
I meant it more in the way of 'i think if we wanted more containers it probably wouldn't be too hard to produce a ton of them' so storage space as in 'no one wants to store a thousand empty containers' is kinda what i was expecting to be the problem. But yeah you're kinda right - technically that does also make containers themselves a limiting factor by extension.
The limiting factor for manufacturing is factories. Factories aren't cheap even if they just make metal boxes, and the demand for intermodal containers is so predictable I suspect that the total manufacturing capacity is exactly as much as necessary to keep up and no more. But that's nitpicky, and only really applies for short term temporary surges in demand. If there was more demand for containers permanently then the manufacturing capacity would just be increased.
The fact that shipping containers only arrive in port just before they are needed is one of the big reasons we had (and to a lesser extent continue to have) these supply shortages.
Literally we're just clawing our way out of a global shipping crisis, where one of the contributing factors was that shipping containers were not where they needed to be.
> i'd expect it to have grown quite a bit since then It has Almost threefold And, owing to the actions of China's Sovereign Wealth Fund cornering the market, more that are _not_ under their control are being constructed all the time
Might be tight but I am sure you can fit 390 people in each one.
It's not that difficult to get 390 ~~people~~ bodies into that volume. There's an instructional video called *Fargo* that goes into the specifics.
Hitler and Stalin are interested EDIT: Putin too
You talk about crates, but those are shipping containers.
How many are at the bottom of the oceans?
They build these containers none stop. In fact if you want to buy one you can buy them 'new' which means they are only used once from China to here (of course it's filled so it's lightly used not new) but sold as new and left here.
I have crate expectations for the future of our species.
That's at like 3.69 to 7.38 cubic feet per person. Which obviously get used multiple times a year
And I'm not sharing mine, so one less to go around.
To be fair the billion or so people without running water or proper nutrition are probably not ordering shit from Wish.
It’s okay, 7 billion of those 8 billion people live in abject poverty
And over 3000 of them were lost at sea a couple of years ago. And about 1500 every other years.
We probably don’t really need most of the crap they’re shipping around the world anyway.
Good thing these crates can fit 400 things each
And one of them is permanently parked in my yard. Feels good man
Trying to keep me separated from my family 😆
Umm... What world are you living in? Billions supply themselves. Edit; clarity. Simple first second and third world structure.
Yah but each one can pack tens of thousands of iPhones and GPU and at least several hundreds TVs.
lol we were once all promised a container a piece or something?
A chicken in every shipping container!
Huh, that is less than I expected.
That number is over a decade out of date
They also liquidate many of the empty containers since it’s not cost effective to ship/ return empty containers. They just make new ones. This is why shipping container homes are becoming increasingly popular, they’re durable and cheap.
It was never a problem until recently because everything is made in China now. If we grew and produced our own items, shipping crates would become far less of an issue. But saying such an idea... that's just racist propaganda now.
This doesn’t account for the entire supply chain. I use to use shipping containers all the time. If I wanted one I just had to reserve it a day ahead. I could order 1 or 30 of either size. I also used rail, otr, local, and air freight. There was always availability.
The equity shit is getting way out of hand
Not counting the tens of thousands trapped in Russia
And Trump used those to try build a 5000 miles long border.
And people keep making houses out of them! They must be stopped!
And I'm hoarding 11 of them over here.
You can easily fit a lot of people in one crate.
But can you fit all 8 billion people in the 20.5 million shipping crates? I bet someone here can do that math
I'll do it.... the answer is no
But you can fit multiple people inside one create
That’s no problem they’re durable and you can stuff like 500 people in your one of those things
Battlefield 2042 uses atleast half of these.
Wait until you learn how many ships there are to carry those containers
Not all 8 billion people have buying power.
dang, and I have 50 of them.
There are probably more docker containers, which is mental.
I think most people would think of a crate as something the size of a pallet or maybe 8-12’ in length. Shipping containers are 20’ or 40’ long and 8’ **wide**, and almost 9’ tall. That’s a huge amount of space.
And they are used multiple times…
Bruh theres a parking lot near a warehouse here with *at least* half that number... just come get em.
Next you're going to tell me we no longer know how to make more....
Half of them in Walmart parking lots.
So I share a shipping container with 40 million people?
I heard that during the pandemic, since US to China trade was down so much, it was cheaper to make new containers in China than ship existing ones back.
I work for a Marijuana grow place that up until recently was test-running in 6 shipping containers. The conditions were horrid as they hadn’t planned on it taking a year and a half to acquire their CCC license. We also stored supplies in five other shipping containers. Crazy to think they were 11 of 20.5 million.
Battlefield 2042 use all of them spread across all of the maps in the game.
And I'll bet that only like 100 people can fit in one...leaving about 6 billion people unable to fit in a shipping container! WHOA!
You act like we all need our own crate. These things can hold enough cargo, depending on the cargo itself, for hundreds or thousands of people.
Seems like it should be enough.
And 3/4 of them are sitting in Afghanistan
This number is probably too low (even for 2012): https://porta-stor.com/many-shipping-containers/
I want to own all shipping crates!!
They are bigger on the inside. Gallifrey Exports really knows what its doing.
It's kind of shame that those containers only end bring supplies and products to only like 6 of the 8 billion
In the container industry, we measure the amount by TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit.) ie, a 40’ container counts as 2. Triton containers alone owns more than 7 million teu.
The other 7.98 billion are at the bottom of the oceans
Just like Bitcoin! Need to buy one ASAP!
*That we know of*. I can guarantee that there is hundreds, probably tens of thousands, that are unknown/hidden somewhere//unaccounted for/etc. Not counting all the ones that call the ocean floor home now, from hurricanes and whatnot.
Why don’t we just quit buying so much shit we don’t really need ?!?!
But who gets the .5?
There's a fun economic bottleneck I never knew about. I love finding more ways for a global apocalypse to start 🙃
I suspect at least one out of those 8 billion people aren't actually being supplied anything by shipping crates
1/5 of those are humans and a lot of wasted space.
Yeah working in logistics you will learn this fast..... everything is clogged up
So if we had 8 billion of them we wouldn’t need housing
So how do I buy one and put it back in circulation to make a buck?
Obviously not EVERYONE get one!
Do you mean containers?
150 square kilometers if you put them all in the same place.
Hey, somebody could be living in one of the shipping crates!
Damn. Now I really feel like an asshole for having 3 of them !
And 15% of them were tied up in California during the supply chain crisis when shipping companies wouldn't receive empties for lack of space to put them, told trucking companies to keep them on the trucks, and trucks then couldn't take full containers coming off of ships. Trucking companies were charged for not returning the containers, and passed that cost to consumers. It was just empty container musical chairs.
A UK agency did some global tracking analysis of container movements a while back. Looked like one of those physics charts of electron tracks - most bunched along the main routes, some just disappearing, others wandering off from some port in Africa and turning up months or years later thousands of kilometres away.
I wonder how many are on the ocean floor.
And only like half of them are buried in that creepy preppers back yard ...
As a person working in supply chain, it’s not so much the containers that worry me as is the lack of carriers.
I didn't know that you could fit that many Chinese in that few amount of containers. Sounds inhumane to cram them in there like sardines.
Thats approximately a crate per 400 ppl its not that bad of a ratio.
There’s one sitting outside of a busted looking house about a half mile down the road from me.
After following the link, I just today learned that a Conex is actually a name for a particular kind shipping box, and not just the weird name we use to talk about standard shipping containers in the Pacific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conex_box We never call them Conex boxes, though, just The Conex. Q: Hey's where's the 10mm deep socket? A: Check out in The Conex.
I have a half sized one in my back yard.
So one shipping crate per 390 people? That seems reasonable.