5 ms·

I was surprised to find that between 2,000 to 10,000 containers are lost each year. Seems like with the design on these you’re just asking for trouble. https:

I was surprised to find that between 2,000 to 10,000 containers are lost each year. Seems like with the design on these you’re just asking for trouble. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship

TylerE 6y ago
Is it surprising? There are 800 million containers shipped per year. 10k is is a literal drop in the bucket. It's 99.99875% relability.
- resonantjacket5 6y ago
  I wonder if there's some way to compare that to driving accident/flying accident rates for a comparison. Though I'm not sure how to compare it as drivers drive more than once in a year compared to a container only shipped once.
  - eqvinox 6y ago
    The way to compare that would be to calculate the accident rate per freight ton-kilometer; it's the same consideration as with figuring how "green" some transport is by looking at CO2 per ton-kilometer. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_transportation_measurement#Payload-distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_transportation_measur...
- layoric 6y ago
  While true, it is quite staggering to visualize 100mx100mx75m of shipping containers to represent what gets lost every year. Yes it is tiny in the global scale of what is being shipped but wow that is a large apartment building every year getting dumped into the ocean.
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    > that is a large apartment building every year getting dumped into the ocean. To be fair, we should probably visualize the total amount shipped per year. Which, if all the shipping containers were laid out in a single stack, could completely cover the US state of New Jersey or the country of Belize.
    - layoric 6y ago
      As I stated, "Yes it is tiny in the global scale of what is being shipped". Yes, the reuse of containers is impressively highly efficient but more and more industries are at the scale or significant pollution/externalities comes from small proportional failures. This isn't like dropping 0.0001% of requests on global web servers, dropping the same rate of containers from global shipping means apartment size building being dumped in the ocean every year. Yes, energy is wasted on servers at large scale but this can be/is being mitigated as energy sources move faster and faster to renewable energy. Mitigation is much harder in physical world and should be costed in to resolve/clean up so there is a market to make environment better rather than just treating as an externality to increase margins.
MattGaiser 6y ago
That doesn't seem awful compared to the number of containers. > 1. There are currently over 17 million shipping containers in circulation globally with the number of active shipping containers at more then five million. In total, they make around 200 million trips a year, according to Billie Box. https://www.porttechnology.org/news/10_unknown_facts_about_shipping_containers/ https://www.porttechnology.org/news/10_unknown_facts_about_s...
cromka 6y ago
I think it is actually designed as such on purpose: in the event of adverse weather, loosing some openly stacked containers is less severe than sinking an otherwise concealing but unstable ship. I imagine this is a sort of calculated loss, a trade-off of allowing a heavy ship to adjust – or "self heal", if you will – to extreme conditions dynamically, which should also be very rare and unlikely.
- TylerE 6y ago
  No, nothing like that. It's just to make loading practical. Also, a taller ship with a large mostly empty area up high might have some issues when lightly loaded with crosswinds - but probably more importantly it's just that you would need internal supports which again, will make loading much more complicated.
  - cromka 6y ago
    That makes sense, too. I suppose, at the end of the day, the existing design is just a result of practice: it just works. Most of the time.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Yes, that's a pretty safe assumption in any cutthroat industry with massive competition and tight margins. Corporate darwinism at it's finest.
justinclift 6y ago
Interestingly, that figure seems to be disputed. From an article pointed at by another commenter: https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/could-a-floating-shipping-container-sink-your-yacht-is-the-danger-to-sailors-real-or-imagined-107508 https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/could-a-floating-shipping... Yet finding reliable data on how many containers actually fall overboard is a challenge. The widely quoted figure of 10,000 containers lost every year [1] was the basis for reports by organisations ranging from Friends of the Earth to the US Congress. But the World Shipping Council (WSC), a trade body that represents 90 per cent of the global shipping industry, disputes that number [2]. Based on surveys of its members the WSC reported that for the years 2011, 2012, and 2013 there were around 2,683 containers lost each year [3]. Combining that data with surveys going back to 2008, the WSC reports that excluding ‘catastrophic events’ the number of containers lost every year is a mere 546. Hmmm, the wikipedia page says the same thing too, just after the initial 10k quote: A more recent survey for the six years 2008 through 2013 estimates average losses of individual containers overboard at 546 per year, and average total losses including catastrophic events such as vessel sinkings or groundings at 1,679 per year [.]

TylerE 6y ago

Is it surprising? There are 800 million containers shipped per year. 10k is is a literal drop in the bucket. It's 99.99875% relability.

resonantjacket5 6y ago
I wonder if there's some way to compare that to driving accident/flying accident rates for a comparison. Though I'm not sure how to compare it as drivers drive more than once in a year compared to a container only shipped once.
- eqvinox 6y ago
  The way to compare that would be to calculate the accident rate per freight ton-kilometer; it's the same consideration as with figuring how "green" some transport is by looking at CO2 per ton-kilometer. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_transportation_measurement#Payload-distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_transportation_measur...
layoric 6y ago
While true, it is quite staggering to visualize 100mx100mx75m of shipping containers to represent what gets lost every year. Yes it is tiny in the global scale of what is being shipped but wow that is a large apartment building every year getting dumped into the ocean.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  > that is a large apartment building every year getting dumped into the ocean. To be fair, we should probably visualize the total amount shipped per year. Which, if all the shipping containers were laid out in a single stack, could completely cover the US state of New Jersey or the country of Belize.
  - layoric 6y ago
    As I stated, "Yes it is tiny in the global scale of what is being shipped". Yes, the reuse of containers is impressively highly efficient but more and more industries are at the scale or significant pollution/externalities comes from small proportional failures. This isn't like dropping 0.0001% of requests on global web servers, dropping the same rate of containers from global shipping means apartment size building being dumped in the ocean every year. Yes, energy is wasted on servers at large scale but this can be/is being mitigated as energy sources move faster and faster to renewable energy. Mitigation is much harder in physical world and should be costed in to resolve/clean up so there is a market to make environment better rather than just treating as an externality to increase margins.

MattGaiser 6y ago

That doesn't seem awful compared to the number of containers. > 1. There are currently over 17 million shipping containers in circulation globally with the number of active shipping containers at more then five million. In total, they make around 200 million trips a year, according to Billie Box. https://www.porttechnology.org/news/10_unknown_facts_about_shipping_containers/ https://www.porttechnology.org/news/10_unknown_facts_about_s...

cromka 6y ago

I think it is actually designed as such on purpose: in the event of adverse weather, loosing some openly stacked containers is less severe than sinking an otherwise concealing but unstable ship. I imagine this is a sort of calculated loss, a trade-off of allowing a heavy ship to adjust – or "self heal", if you will – to extreme conditions dynamically, which should also be very rare and unlikely.

TylerE 6y ago
No, nothing like that. It's just to make loading practical. Also, a taller ship with a large mostly empty area up high might have some issues when lightly loaded with crosswinds - but probably more importantly it's just that you would need internal supports which again, will make loading much more complicated.
- cromka 6y ago
  That makes sense, too. I suppose, at the end of the day, the existing design is just a result of practice: it just works. Most of the time.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Yes, that's a pretty safe assumption in any cutthroat industry with massive competition and tight margins. Corporate darwinism at it's finest.

justinclift 6y ago

Interestingly, that figure seems to be disputed. From an article pointed at by another commenter: https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/could-a-floating-shipping-container-sink-your-yacht-is-the-danger-to-sailors-real-or-imagined-107508 https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/could-a-floating-shipping... Yet finding reliable data on how many containers actually fall overboard is a challenge. The widely quoted figure of 10,000 containers lost every year [1] was the basis for reports by organisations ranging from Friends of the Earth to the US Congress. But the World Shipping Council (WSC), a trade body that represents 90 per cent of the global shipping industry, disputes that number [2]. Based on surveys of its members the WSC reported that for the years 2011, 2012, and 2013 there were around 2,683 containers lost each year [3]. Combining that data with surveys going back to 2008, the WSC reports that excluding ‘catastrophic events’ the number of containers lost every year is a mere 546. Hmmm, the wikipedia page says the same thing too, just after the initial 10k quote: A more recent survey for the six years 2008 through 2013 estimates average losses of individual containers overboard at 546 per year, and average total losses including catastrophic events such as vessel sinkings or groundings at 1,679 per year [.]