12 ms·

The futuristic cargo ship made of wood

51 points by perfunctory 6y ago

xyzzyz 6y ago
I love wood sailing ships, and I think it’s pretty amazing that you can get people to sponsor you building and sailing them in current year. Of course, from perspective of actually fighting climate change, the idea is beyond silly, but what really happens here is that you’re selling to people the idea that you’re doing it for the climate, you’re selling the feeling of doing good, and people can spend lots of money to feel and signal that. I applaud the people behind the project, and my only worry is that stunts like these are going to distract from and remove the steam from efforts that actually push the needle.
- pqs 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment. We all know that a shipping industry based on wood boats would be awful for the environment. We all know what would happen to the Amazon. So yes, you are right, it is silly to sell this as a solution to climate change.
  - ricardobeat 6y ago
    Isn't wood one of the few renewable building resources we have? Besides building ships out of aluminum I don't see any other better choices. I don't totally agree with the conclusion; in the article itself they admit that this is more of a flagship project to show it's possible to achieve fossil-fuel-free shipping, not a solid commercial venture. Or maybe that was sarcasm? Better avoided in this forum.
    - jabl 6y ago
      Steel is fine too; the crust of the earth is about 5% iron, so it's not like we're going to run out of it. Current steel production is terribly high in emissions though, but e.g. hydrogen reduction as is being done by the HYBRIT project in Sweden show the way how to fix that.
      - corty 6y ago
        Each of concrete, steel, traffic will double our energy consumption. So if you want to do those from renewables, we will need to quadruple production, yet we struggle with providing even the current level of electricity from renewables. Green steel, concrete or traffic from hydrogen is a far-out pipedream for quite some time.
    - gmueckl 6y ago
      In the past, wood was an essential resource for building navies and it took a lot of wood to build the navies of old. The Romans deforested a huge chunk of their lands to retain their naval power in the Mediterranean.
    - pqs 6y ago
      Yes, it is renewable, but it renews very slowly. Thus, to start a massive wood based shipping industry (it should be massive to have an impact) it would cause serious deforestation. Large wood based military navies caused large deforestation in the past.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      We can’t build ships of large size from wood. It’s just not technically possible, wood is not a suitable material for a structure that’s subject to stresses required. You’d need to add extensive steel skeleton structure to support it, and even then you’d be fighting constant leaks, and risking sinking at high seas. Wood works great for constructing large buildings, but ships are not like buildings: unlike them, they are subject to large dynamic stresses. That’s why before widespread structural steel in 19th century, wooden ships were tiny. Mayflower was less than 30 meters long. They didn’t build it larger because they lacked lumber, they did it because previous attempts at larger ships tended to break apart at sea.
- konjin 6y ago
  The only effort that matters is the move to nuclear power. We are so far away from doing anything meaningful about climate change that any projects, including solar, we are pushing for today are meaningless. Enjoy the 30 good years left where industrial civilization can be stably sustained and then be prepared for the bumpy ride to a world of 500 million over the next century or two.
  - bildung 6y ago
    Nuclear is essentially done (outside of niches), simply because renewables have become cheaper (in $/MWh produced) than nuclear, while having non of nuclears disadvantages.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    The only effort that matters is the move to nuclear power. I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK. We won't solve climate change without dramatically changing our patterns of consumption. Trying to apply technical fixes is repeating the same patterns of thought that got us here in the first place.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      > I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK. I'm having a very hard time believing that. In Czechia there are companies building entire towns (for rent), and these are still small compared to some of the new industrial areas, surely that can't be less concrete than a nuclear power plant
    - corty 6y ago
      Thats just the biggest single-piece concrete pour. Any random highway bridge has a similar total volume of concrete, just not in a single pour.
    - ip26 6y ago
      We will never reach carbon zero through austerity alone.
flybrand 6y ago
Why build the ships of wood? Show that you can build containers.
azepoi 6y ago
I think there is a place for sailing cargo ships, not convinced about wood though but would love to be wrong. Related, here is a project of a 67.5m/221ft long (LOA) sailing ship, with what looks like a steel hull https://www.towt.eu/voilier-cargo-towt/?lang=en https://www.towt.eu/voilier-cargo-towt/?lang=en Best of luck to the Ceiba/sailcargo team though! The project -> https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel
okso 6y ago
Wood is an interesting material: It is biodegradable and it's production is cheap and captures CO2.
- taneq 6y ago
  True. It can also have surprisingly good strength to weight ratio if used correctly. I'm no carpenter but I'd suspect the downsides are that it's biodegradable (and hence it will rot and things will eat it), it's a biological material and so its properties are going to be somewhat inconsistent, and it's very labour intensive to build with. I'd also be curious just how cheap it is per strength (not weight or volume) compared with steel. I'd suspect the comparison comes out heavily in steel's favour or we'd be using way more wood.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  >captures CO2 ...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades. I do wonder if long-intended-lifespan wood materials, like the cross-laminated timber used to build this wooden skyscraper (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revolution-timber/index.html https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revoluti...) could consume enough volume to make a meaningful dent in the carbon balance for the near/mid term of the next decades/century.
  - solstice 6y ago
    > ...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades. Easy, shoot it into space! /s
    - corty 6y ago
      Sink it into a deeper sea region, it won't rot for a few millenia.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    That depends on where it biodegrades, how fast, the active lifespan and the number. For instance the lumber in a building might stay in use for 100 years. Even if we aim for sustainability instead of our exponential growth pyramid schemes, every wooden structure ties up that carbon for its life span, after which another will be built. If the number of buildings we needs declines, we can plant more forests in the space we are no longer using.
adrianN 6y ago
From the pictures the ship looks awfully small compared to container ships. I wonder whether the economics will work out for them.
- sradman 6y ago
  > Ceiba is small for a cargo ship – tiny in fact. She will carry around nine standard shipping containers. The largest conventional container ships today carry more than 20,000 containers.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    She will carry the cargo equivalent of 9 shipping containers, or they are going to actually load 9 shipping containers onto the ship? The ships and crews are expensive. Any time they aren't moving they aren't making money. Isn't the whole point of shipping containers that you can buffer them up and then rapidly load them onto a ship once it arrives?
- Ekaros 6y ago
  It won't. Capacity is minuscule this is 9 containers small ones are 1000-3000 and giants are 20000. Speed is 2/3rds. The crew is likely larger or same size. Plus wooden ships are pain to maintain. Though lifespan might be larger. Not sure about costs to build though. I just can't see reasonable way for this to work outside customers who really want to pay the premium for slower service.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    On the other hand the crew might get a larger share of the profits compared to the crew on container ships. Also, this is a prototype and effectively a research platform. And if you are going to build with wood, there are not many contemporary designs floating around. Starting with a proven design may be a good idea.
    - jabl 6y ago
      Some of the (few) other sail cargo ships make it work by having most of the crew paying for the privilege. It's kind of like an adventure vacation.
leoedin 6y ago
I'd love to see truly modern wind powered ships - maybe more rotor ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship) or something using a modern CFD designed computer controlled aerofoil. Something that could actually slot into the modern shipping industry and reduce emissions - even if only by 20% or in favourable winds. Building 120 year old ship designs without the aid of modern construction techniques is cool, but it's not going to change the shipping industry.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  It seems that they are indeed pioneering new technology, a mix of solar + sails + electric propulsion, including power regen from underwater propellers. It will have "one of the largest marine electric engines in the world". The wood framing is likely just the most accessible way to build a technology demonstration model.
  - specialist 6y ago
    > power regen from underwater propellers Like this? https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/ https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/
- Gwypaas 6y ago
  Wallenius Marine is designing one. Together with their partner Wilhemsen they are one of the words largest Ro-Ro operators. Completely different scale, although always hard when one of the incumbents try to innovate. https://www.oceanbirdwallenius.com/ https://www.oceanbirdwallenius.com/
- specialist 6y ago
  I've idly wondered if wave glider powered mini-barges could be used for some tasks. Like maybe a convoy fleet for timber. Or smuggling. https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/ https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/ -- After some quick googling: gliders travel 0.5-1.5 knots large cargo ships max at 25 knots. downward trend to save fuel, 20 knots is becoming norm. future norm might be as low as 12 knots. duration of trips between China and USA have been 2 - 4 weeks. so will lengthen to 4 - 8 weeks. so... given 7947 nautical miles (China to USA), a glider would take 11 months. Hmmm. -- For future, imagine 12 knots satisfies majority of tasks. There may be payloads where 2 months transit may be acceptable. Is there some combo of sail, foil, rotor, glider, coasting that could sustain 6 knots? Would much smaller, more frequent cargo ships be acceptable. One final notion: My original imagined use case for wave gliders is ocean cleanup. Various kinds of plastic sifting barges, forever at sea. Maybe bundle the plastic and drop it into a trench. Maybe have some kind of solar powered bio reactor that uses plastic as fuel. Maybe other bigger ships gathering the bails of plastic, like land based garbage trucks ply our neighborhoods.
perfunctory 6y ago
> After a day spent at the shipyard watching Ceiba being built, I ask Lynx Guimond, another co-founder of Sailcargo, what he thinks is really needed to cut the shipping industry’s sizeable emissions. Perhaps surprisingly for someone in the middle of building a ship, he tells me that one of the solutions is simply less shipping. “At the end of the day we just need to transport less stuff.” I love it when people are so brutally honest about their own work.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Absolutely correct. Sadly, the best solution is for corporations to make more robust, high-quality, long-lasting, expensive, products. i.e. Make less money, and do better work. So...who's first at bat?
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    Whoever can do so at the systemic level instead of expecting individual corporations to not be evil. I'm not really in the mood to discuss whether or not government regulation has any hope of doing so here, since there's a much-too-common inability to look beyond the dysfunctional US political system that is just too tiresome to discuss around on a Monday morning. But I will say on a meta-level that one way or another this must involve some form of politics, because fundamentally it's about humans trying to bring out desired human behavior.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      Heck, it's too tiresome to discuss on Tuesday-Sunday, as well.
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      Global climate accords, putting a price on carbon and thus making steel and burning fuel more expensive. The market can optimize well as long as the cost function is good.
      - 6y ago
nojokes 6y ago
How is taking down more forest environmentally sound idea?
- Milner08 6y ago
  I guess you have to compare the impact of cutting down some trees (and replacing them, I assume? Maybe even replacing them with more trees in a wider area), drying them and cutting them with the impact of mining, smelting and producing Steel for more traditional ships. I assume mining also involves removing trees and wildlife to clear the area. These things aren't always as obvious as "cutting down trees is bad", if it's better than the alternatives and we can offset the impact then its an improvement right?
  - brixon 6y ago
    It is worth a study since the trees needed for ships (hard woods) is very different than trees needed for construction/paper (soft woods). Pine trees grow fast and can be harvested while relatively young and weak. Trees for ships tend to be older and stronger hard woods that take much longer to grow.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      As I understand it, paper doesn't care how tight grained the wood pulp was. Wooden beams meant for longevity or load bearing very much do, and a lot of the best ones are hardwood (deciduous), or the cypress family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressaceae) many of which are slow growing but very long-lived.
owenversteeg 6y ago
While I love the idea of bulk transport based on sail power, making this out of wood instead of steel is really one of those feel-good things instead of a practical way to protect the earth. The trees Ceiba is made of take the better part of a century to grow to maturity, and steel is actually pretty good for the environment all things considered: most steel container ships are recycled due to the high value of the steel. A completely different story to fiberglass, which is basically plastic and is tossed in landfills.
- Someone 6y ago
  If only fiberglass were plastic. It’s a composite of glass and plastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberglass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberglass). Separating the two for recycling is difficult.
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    Yeah, a lovely mix that causes cancer if you break it... I have a feeling we're a long, long way off from large scale recycling of fiberglass.
hinkley 6y ago
How do they load and unload this ship? I don't see anything in the article or on their home page.
- sradman 6y ago
  Ceiba is a traditional three-mast schooner [1] that carries an equivalent of 9 shipping containers but not actual containers: > The design of the Ceiba Line vessels boasts two cargo hatches to access the holds, which can be used simultaneously. This increases flexibility and storage options when loading and unloading cargo. Construction [2] of the first ship started January 2019 in Costa Rica and is ongoing. The company strategy is ethical shipping that removes modern container ships from the supply chain. I suspect that this ship/company will be part of the marketing message for Fair Trade coffee and other organic/sustainable products from the tropics. The story [3] is not about automation, engineering, or productivity; it is about pre-industrial purity. [1] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel [2] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/milestones https://www.sailcargo.org/en/milestones [3] https://youtu.be/rNf7-34tW8I https://youtu.be/rNf7-34tW8I
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I wonder how many people in this conversation have actually seen a shipping port first hand. I've spent a good deal of time gazing out at the docks at the Port of Seattle. There are train cars and last-mile tractor-trailers that are designed to have a cargo container bolted directly to them. Without the containers, you have to repack the cargo half a dozen times: - factory to truck/train - truck to docks - docks to ship - ship to docks - docks to truck/train - truck to warehouse/distribution center With the shipping containers you have: - warehouse to container - container to warehouse/distribution center The effort needed to move the container instead of the contents is a couple orders of magnitude less, which is the whole point of the containers.
    - sradman 6y ago
      Marc Levinson's book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [1] is a good source. Many people, including a very vocal minority of HN commenters, subscribe to a romanticized view of nature. Steven Pinker refers to this as the Noble Savage [2] in his book The Blank Slate [3]. Personally, I think Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and Charles Darwin's Tangled Bank are both manifestations of the same marvellous mechanism: emergent order. [1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/the-box https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
liminal 6y ago
I believe high carbon taxes are what's needed to capture the negative externalities of our current systems. All these do-good attempts are wonderful to show what's possible, but so much more would happen automatically if we just accounted for the true costs of things.

51 points by perfunctory 6y ago

I love wood sailing ships, and I think it’s pretty amazing that you can get people to sponsor you building and sailing them in current year. Of course, from perspective of actually fighting climate change, the idea is beyond silly, but what really happens here is that you’re selling to people the idea that you’re doing it for the climate, you’re selling the feeling of doing good, and people can spend lots of money to feel and signal that. I applaud the people behind the project, and my only worry is that stunts like these are going to distract from and remove the steam from efforts that actually push the needle.

pqs 6y ago
Thanks for your comment. We all know that a shipping industry based on wood boats would be awful for the environment. We all know what would happen to the Amazon. So yes, you are right, it is silly to sell this as a solution to climate change.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  Isn't wood one of the few renewable building resources we have? Besides building ships out of aluminum I don't see any other better choices. I don't totally agree with the conclusion; in the article itself they admit that this is more of a flagship project to show it's possible to achieve fossil-fuel-free shipping, not a solid commercial venture. Or maybe that was sarcasm? Better avoided in this forum.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Steel is fine too; the crust of the earth is about 5% iron, so it's not like we're going to run out of it. Current steel production is terribly high in emissions though, but e.g. hydrogen reduction as is being done by the HYBRIT project in Sweden show the way how to fix that.
    - corty 6y ago
      Each of concrete, steel, traffic will double our energy consumption. So if you want to do those from renewables, we will need to quadruple production, yet we struggle with providing even the current level of electricity from renewables. Green steel, concrete or traffic from hydrogen is a far-out pipedream for quite some time.
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    In the past, wood was an essential resource for building navies and it took a lot of wood to build the navies of old. The Romans deforested a huge chunk of their lands to retain their naval power in the Mediterranean.
  - pqs 6y ago
    Yes, it is renewable, but it renews very slowly. Thus, to start a massive wood based shipping industry (it should be massive to have an impact) it would cause serious deforestation. Large wood based military navies caused large deforestation in the past.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    We can’t build ships of large size from wood. It’s just not technically possible, wood is not a suitable material for a structure that’s subject to stresses required. You’d need to add extensive steel skeleton structure to support it, and even then you’d be fighting constant leaks, and risking sinking at high seas. Wood works great for constructing large buildings, but ships are not like buildings: unlike them, they are subject to large dynamic stresses. That’s why before widespread structural steel in 19th century, wooden ships were tiny. Mayflower was less than 30 meters long. They didn’t build it larger because they lacked lumber, they did it because previous attempts at larger ships tended to break apart at sea.
konjin 6y ago
The only effort that matters is the move to nuclear power. We are so far away from doing anything meaningful about climate change that any projects, including solar, we are pushing for today are meaningless. Enjoy the 30 good years left where industrial civilization can be stably sustained and then be prepared for the bumpy ride to a world of 500 million over the next century or two.
- bildung 6y ago
  Nuclear is essentially done (outside of niches), simply because renewables have become cheaper (in $/MWh produced) than nuclear, while having non of nuclears disadvantages.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The only effort that matters is the move to nuclear power. I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK. We won't solve climate change without dramatically changing our patterns of consumption. Trying to apply technical fixes is repeating the same patterns of thought that got us here in the first place.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    > I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK. I'm having a very hard time believing that. In Czechia there are companies building entire towns (for rent), and these are still small compared to some of the new industrial areas, surely that can't be less concrete than a nuclear power plant
  - corty 6y ago
    Thats just the biggest single-piece concrete pour. Any random highway bridge has a similar total volume of concrete, just not in a single pour.
  - ip26 6y ago
    We will never reach carbon zero through austerity alone.

flybrand 6y ago

Why build the ships of wood? Show that you can build containers.

azepoi 6y ago

I think there is a place for sailing cargo ships, not convinced about wood though but would love to be wrong. Related, here is a project of a 67.5m/221ft long (LOA) sailing ship, with what looks like a steel hull https://www.towt.eu/voilier-cargo-towt/?lang=en https://www.towt.eu/voilier-cargo-towt/?lang=en Best of luck to the Ceiba/sailcargo team though! The project -> https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel

okso 6y ago

Wood is an interesting material: It is biodegradable and it's production is cheap and captures CO2.

taneq 6y ago
True. It can also have surprisingly good strength to weight ratio if used correctly. I'm no carpenter but I'd suspect the downsides are that it's biodegradable (and hence it will rot and things will eat it), it's a biological material and so its properties are going to be somewhat inconsistent, and it's very labour intensive to build with. I'd also be curious just how cheap it is per strength (not weight or volume) compared with steel. I'd suspect the comparison comes out heavily in steel's favour or we'd be using way more wood.
Baeocystin 6y ago
>captures CO2 ...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades. I do wonder if long-intended-lifespan wood materials, like the cross-laminated timber used to build this wooden skyscraper (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revolution-timber/index.html https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revoluti...) could consume enough volume to make a meaningful dent in the carbon balance for the near/mid term of the next decades/century.
- solstice 6y ago
  > ...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades. Easy, shoot it into space! /s
  - corty 6y ago
    Sink it into a deeper sea region, it won't rot for a few millenia.
- hinkley 6y ago
  That depends on where it biodegrades, how fast, the active lifespan and the number. For instance the lumber in a building might stay in use for 100 years. Even if we aim for sustainability instead of our exponential growth pyramid schemes, every wooden structure ties up that carbon for its life span, after which another will be built. If the number of buildings we needs declines, we can plant more forests in the space we are no longer using.

adrianN 6y ago

From the pictures the ship looks awfully small compared to container ships. I wonder whether the economics will work out for them.

sradman 6y ago
> Ceiba is small for a cargo ship – tiny in fact. She will carry around nine standard shipping containers. The largest conventional container ships today carry more than 20,000 containers.
- hinkley 6y ago
  She will carry the cargo equivalent of 9 shipping containers, or they are going to actually load 9 shipping containers onto the ship? The ships and crews are expensive. Any time they aren't moving they aren't making money. Isn't the whole point of shipping containers that you can buffer them up and then rapidly load them onto a ship once it arrives?
Ekaros 6y ago
It won't. Capacity is minuscule this is 9 containers small ones are 1000-3000 and giants are 20000. Speed is 2/3rds. The crew is likely larger or same size. Plus wooden ships are pain to maintain. Though lifespan might be larger. Not sure about costs to build though. I just can't see reasonable way for this to work outside customers who really want to pay the premium for slower service.
- jacobush 6y ago
  On the other hand the crew might get a larger share of the profits compared to the crew on container ships. Also, this is a prototype and effectively a research platform. And if you are going to build with wood, there are not many contemporary designs floating around. Starting with a proven design may be a good idea.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Some of the (few) other sail cargo ships make it work by having most of the crew paying for the privilege. It's kind of like an adventure vacation.

leoedin 6y ago

I'd love to see truly modern wind powered ships - maybe more rotor ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship) or something using a modern CFD designed computer controlled aerofoil. Something that could actually slot into the modern shipping industry and reduce emissions - even if only by 20% or in favourable winds. Building 120 year old ship designs without the aid of modern construction techniques is cool, but it's not going to change the shipping industry.

ricardobeat 6y ago
It seems that they are indeed pioneering new technology, a mix of solar + sails + electric propulsion, including power regen from underwater propellers. It will have "one of the largest marine electric engines in the world". The wood framing is likely just the most accessible way to build a technology demonstration model.
- specialist 6y ago
  > power regen from underwater propellers Like this? https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/ https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/
Gwypaas 6y ago
Wallenius Marine is designing one. Together with their partner Wilhemsen they are one of the words largest Ro-Ro operators. Completely different scale, although always hard when one of the incumbents try to innovate. https://www.oceanbirdwallenius.com/ https://www.oceanbirdwallenius.com/
specialist 6y ago
I've idly wondered if wave glider powered mini-barges could be used for some tasks. Like maybe a convoy fleet for timber. Or smuggling. https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/ https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/ -- After some quick googling: gliders travel 0.5-1.5 knots large cargo ships max at 25 knots. downward trend to save fuel, 20 knots is becoming norm. future norm might be as low as 12 knots. duration of trips between China and USA have been 2 - 4 weeks. so will lengthen to 4 - 8 weeks. so... given 7947 nautical miles (China to USA), a glider would take 11 months. Hmmm. -- For future, imagine 12 knots satisfies majority of tasks. There may be payloads where 2 months transit may be acceptable. Is there some combo of sail, foil, rotor, glider, coasting that could sustain 6 knots? Would much smaller, more frequent cargo ships be acceptable. One final notion: My original imagined use case for wave gliders is ocean cleanup. Various kinds of plastic sifting barges, forever at sea. Maybe bundle the plastic and drop it into a trench. Maybe have some kind of solar powered bio reactor that uses plastic as fuel. Maybe other bigger ships gathering the bails of plastic, like land based garbage trucks ply our neighborhoods.

perfunctory 6y ago

> After a day spent at the shipyard watching Ceiba being built, I ask Lynx Guimond, another co-founder of Sailcargo, what he thinks is really needed to cut the shipping industry’s sizeable emissions. Perhaps surprisingly for someone in the middle of building a ship, he tells me that one of the solutions is simply less shipping. “At the end of the day we just need to transport less stuff.” I love it when people are so brutally honest about their own work.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Absolutely correct. Sadly, the best solution is for corporations to make more robust, high-quality, long-lasting, expensive, products. i.e. Make less money, and do better work. So...who's first at bat?
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  Whoever can do so at the systemic level instead of expecting individual corporations to not be evil. I'm not really in the mood to discuss whether or not government regulation has any hope of doing so here, since there's a much-too-common inability to look beyond the dysfunctional US political system that is just too tiresome to discuss around on a Monday morning. But I will say on a meta-level that one way or another this must involve some form of politics, because fundamentally it's about humans trying to bring out desired human behavior.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Heck, it's too tiresome to discuss on Tuesday-Sunday, as well.
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    Global climate accords, putting a price on carbon and thus making steel and burning fuel more expensive. The market can optimize well as long as the cost function is good.
    - 6y ago

nojokes 6y ago

How is taking down more forest environmentally sound idea?

Milner08 6y ago
I guess you have to compare the impact of cutting down some trees (and replacing them, I assume? Maybe even replacing them with more trees in a wider area), drying them and cutting them with the impact of mining, smelting and producing Steel for more traditional ships. I assume mining also involves removing trees and wildlife to clear the area. These things aren't always as obvious as "cutting down trees is bad", if it's better than the alternatives and we can offset the impact then its an improvement right?
- brixon 6y ago
  It is worth a study since the trees needed for ships (hard woods) is very different than trees needed for construction/paper (soft woods). Pine trees grow fast and can be harvested while relatively young and weak. Trees for ships tend to be older and stronger hard woods that take much longer to grow.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    As I understand it, paper doesn't care how tight grained the wood pulp was. Wooden beams meant for longevity or load bearing very much do, and a lot of the best ones are hardwood (deciduous), or the cypress family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressaceae) many of which are slow growing but very long-lived.

owenversteeg 6y ago

While I love the idea of bulk transport based on sail power, making this out of wood instead of steel is really one of those feel-good things instead of a practical way to protect the earth. The trees Ceiba is made of take the better part of a century to grow to maturity, and steel is actually pretty good for the environment all things considered: most steel container ships are recycled due to the high value of the steel. A completely different story to fiberglass, which is basically plastic and is tossed in landfills.

Someone 6y ago
If only fiberglass were plastic. It’s a composite of glass and plastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberglass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberglass). Separating the two for recycling is difficult.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Yeah, a lovely mix that causes cancer if you break it... I have a feeling we're a long, long way off from large scale recycling of fiberglass.

hinkley 6y ago

How do they load and unload this ship? I don't see anything in the article or on their home page.

sradman 6y ago
Ceiba is a traditional three-mast schooner [1] that carries an equivalent of 9 shipping containers but not actual containers: > The design of the Ceiba Line vessels boasts two cargo hatches to access the holds, which can be used simultaneously. This increases flexibility and storage options when loading and unloading cargo. Construction [2] of the first ship started January 2019 in Costa Rica and is ongoing. The company strategy is ethical shipping that removes modern container ships from the supply chain. I suspect that this ship/company will be part of the marketing message for Fair Trade coffee and other organic/sustainable products from the tropics. The story [3] is not about automation, engineering, or productivity; it is about pre-industrial purity. [1] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel [2] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/milestones https://www.sailcargo.org/en/milestones [3] https://youtu.be/rNf7-34tW8I https://youtu.be/rNf7-34tW8I
- hinkley 6y ago
  I wonder how many people in this conversation have actually seen a shipping port first hand. I've spent a good deal of time gazing out at the docks at the Port of Seattle. There are train cars and last-mile tractor-trailers that are designed to have a cargo container bolted directly to them. Without the containers, you have to repack the cargo half a dozen times: - factory to truck/train - truck to docks - docks to ship - ship to docks - docks to truck/train - truck to warehouse/distribution center With the shipping containers you have: - warehouse to container - container to warehouse/distribution center The effort needed to move the container instead of the contents is a couple orders of magnitude less, which is the whole point of the containers.
  - sradman 6y ago
    Marc Levinson's book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [1] is a good source. Many people, including a very vocal minority of HN commenters, subscribe to a romanticized view of nature. Steven Pinker refers to this as the Noble Savage [2] in his book The Blank Slate [3]. Personally, I think Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and Charles Darwin's Tangled Bank are both manifestations of the same marvellous mechanism: emergent order. [1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/the-box https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate

liminal 6y ago

I believe high carbon taxes are what's needed to capture the negative externalities of our current systems. All these do-good attempts are wonderful to show what's possible, but so much more would happen automatically if we just accounted for the true costs of things.