As it charges forward to its target capacity of 8 million TEU capacity, the Port of Melbourne has broken an Australian record in the last year, handling 3.018 million TEUs of shipping containers. Will the locals let it reach higher? What are TEUs? Twenty-foot Equivalent Units are the units by which containers are measured. They…
Did you know that 99% of trade into and out of Australia comes by shipping container? Celebrating this, the National Maritime Museum has sent its ‘Container’, shipping container exhibition on tour around the country after its initial spell at the Sydney National Maritime Museum. People in Wollongong can now pay a visit to the six,…
In South Australia, grid battery storage has proven itself – it is now an important part of the state’s energy mix. Typically however, the sheer cost of batteries per kilowatt hour (kWh) makes them hard to justify. Could existing large power storage systems, such as those at data centres, be used as part of the…
Pupils in the English North Somerset town of Clevedon have got together to fundraise for a new library consisting of two shipping containers. Clevedon is a sleepy seaside town on the Bristol Channel close to Avonmouth Docks, a medium sized port near the city of Bristol. It has a rich maritime heritage, that the pupils…
Shipping container transport is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted that many of the goods in our home, medicines and food, may have come to us in a humble shipping container. For around the first 20 years of shipping container transport, perishable goods were a liability. In bright sunshine, the contents of the…
A new shipping container farm has opened in Brisbane, supplying local businesses with herbs and vegetables that may otherwise have had to be imported from far away. The farm owner went into container farming due to drought on his own land. With our ever less predictable climate, there’s a risk that what arable topsoil we…
A university in Germany is developing a robot to unload shipping containers. This is one of the most complex processes in shipping container logistics. Robots on the march One of the coolest things about shipping containers is that they can carry almost anything and be moved around the world in a super-efficient process that is…
A businessman has been given an award for the way he hid his shipping container storage unit in plain sight. No matter the wonders of shipping containers – they don’t fit just anywhere… They can sit very well in a post-industrial landscape full of old warehouses and port machinery. The quasi brutalist nature of the…
There’s a race on to power the transport of the future. Carbon isn’t even in the running. The two front runners are hydrogen and batteries as a method of storing electricity. In this piece we will look at a zero carbon emission hydrogen extraction and storage plant that sits in a shipping container, while reflecting…
We’ve touched on some great uses for shipping containers here at the Gateway Gazette. Here’s one of the most purposeful: a lifeboat station in a shipping container. This isn’t some rusty box dragged onto a beach, but is one where the entire lifeboat station and boat are built in the UK and donated to countries…