Chipping Away at Container Shipping or “How I stopped worrying and learned to love the blog”
My obsession with the container shipping industry began innocently enough with one simple revelation:
“A single cargo ship coming into New York Harbor can release as much pollution as 350,000 current-model-year cars in an hour.” — Russell Long, NY Times 2/21/04
Excuse me — 350,000 cars per hour? I couldn’t come to terms with how this could be possible — that a seemingly innocuous ship could produce as much air pollution as 26 football fields of idling cars…in an hour. So, I began to dig.
Until recently, I had never given container ships that much thought. Little did I know that the largest of these vessels are — at 305 feet — taller than the Statue of Liberty and are about as long — 1,250 feet — as the Empire State Building is tall. Nor did I know that the majority of these ships run on bunker oil — literally the bottom of the oil barrel — a fuel with the consistency of mud and sulfur levels 3,000 times that of gasoline.
Furthermore, ships import an estimated 67 percent of consumer goods purchased by Americans and cargo shipping is expected to double by 2020 with 90 percent of globally traded goods shipped by sea.
Then, there is the issue of ballast, brilliantly illustrated by Joel Makower:
“Modern cargo ships hold within their hulls millions of gallons of water, which is moved around to ensure the ship is properly trimmed, improving safety and speed. Ships routinely exchange ballast water while in port as cargo is loaded or unloaded. The water pumped out of the ship is alive with organisms from ports previously visited. One analysis of ballast water from foreign ships entering Canada found as many as 12,392 marine creatures per cubic meter. The survivors often invade their adopted homes, sometimes wreaking havoc; the zebra mussel fouling the Great Lakes is just one example.”
-Joel Makower, Grist 23May06
Every aspect of container shipping seems couched in extremes — the massive size of the ships, the growing scale of sea-based shipping, the extreme impurity of the fuel involved to the massive proportion of pollution produced. I soon found that discussing, let alone digesting, all of the problems (and thankfully, solutions) concerning the container ship industry an overwhelming undertaking.
Enter the blog — a format where I can gradually parse and post about the various aspects of a subject without ever having to arrive at a culminating ‘final word.’
So, beginning with this post, I am going to experiment with structuring a discussion of the container shipping industry in digestible, bite-sized posts.
Look for future posts to include more in-depth details concerning the container shipping industry’s ills, as well as some cleantech solutions that may aid in rescuing it from its ruinous state.
Curtiss P. Martin is ScribeMedia.Org’s CleanTech editor.
Curtiss P. Martin grew up in a geodesic dome on the side of a mountain in Southern Appalachia. Now he serves as ScribeMedia's clean technology editor in a tall building in downtown Manhattan.
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