Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit- How they are made

goldie fish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7l6AQN1KV0

We see them every day. Never gave a thought as to how they are put together..

zagmund

I always thought they grew them on those farms down by the docks - you see them growing 3 or 4 units tall until the harvesters come along and cut the fresh ones from the top.

Seriously though - thanks for the video. I heard the term TEU previously, but never realised it stood for anything as mundane as Twenty foot Equivalent Unit.

z

seanmacc

Out of Dublin empty containers are shipped back and reused.

When I was living outside Portland Oregon a longshoreman was telling me that the majority of their containers get broken down and recycled, some get reused in the states but practically none return to China or Japan due to the practically one way traffic from Asia into the US in imports. Most containers are now designed to be disposable nowadays.

It seems awful wasteful when you think of it.

bladebrew

I think loads of them are scrapped, there is no where near as much stuff going back to Asia compared to what they send to us,
There is a scrapyard near work where you can see the machine to stand the containers up to fill them with scrap metal, then I believe all the metal including container is recycled!

Tabnabs

I understand the uneconomic cost of shipping them back empty to the far east. But surely the cost of making a brand new one each time journey would be prohibitively expensive?

bladebrew

I read it about the scrapping somewhere, I don't remember where though! And cant find any reference now.There is a part of this article that says about 20% of containers at sea are actually empty, which seems to suggest they do ship a lot of them back to Asia with nothing at all in them!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21432226

Cookie_Monster

bladebrew wrote: »

I read it about the scrapping somewhere, I don't remember where though! And cant find any reference now.There is a part of this article that says about 20% of containers at sea are actually empty, which seems to suggest they do ship a lot of them back to Asia with nothing at all in them!

I would have thought that would make sense, the ships have to go back to Asia anyway so why not backhaul the empties?

murphym7

I worked on Feeders for a while (awful job by the way) and we used to have emptys all the time. Now that was on very short routes, but we did always have lots of emptys.

I would be very surprised if it was common practice to be scrapping empty containers rather that ship them back east, however there is still a cost to ship emptys around the world, so I dont know, maybe there is. I would need to be convinced it was common practice though.

who the fug

You always got a better rate on a box going to the Far East than coming west , as they are desperate for any revenue to cover shipping the empty boxes back

bladebrew

I was sure i posted in here yesterday, the problem with the containers is cost of sailing around with them empty, the same with finding backloads for road transport is important,
Ireland has/had a hilarious problem of having to import empty containers because we export more than we import so we need to get them from holland to balance it out,
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/shippers-paying-millions-for-empty-cargo-containers-26844866.html

maersk also spent $1bn shipping empties around, the link is complicated to me but seems to suggest using reefers for everything just dont switch them on unless you need to!
http://gcaptain.com/filling-shippings-billion-hole/

there is a mention on fecking wikipedia that says it is often cheaper to buy a new container in the far east rather than ship one back empty but it dosent elaborate on that,

Tabnabs

There are companies such as Staxxon and Cargoshell who are trying to come up with a solution, but no-one seems interested in biting.