There are millions of square kilometres of wilderness that you can’t access in a 200 metre luxury yacht. It’d be difficult to get one of those to Uluru! That’s why it seems two companies have developed giant camper vans that can take the owner in luxury over wild wastelands to wherever they choose and then…
Moving a shipping container around the world today is a lot more efficient than the old ‘break bulk’ method. Though on the ground the movements can be quite simple, there is still a lot of inefficiency in getting a company to handle those movements. After establishing the problem we will look at four companies trying…
The world’s first zero emissions, fully autonomous container ship is to be launched next year in 2018. The plan is for these vessels to be cheaper to run and with zero emissions to save on diesel emissions from 40,000 heavy truck journeys every year. Will it actually be safer than container ships that ply the…
Container ships have revolutionised the world of cargo. Where once moving goods by sea cost around 25% of their final retail value, container ships have brought the cost down to as little as 2.5 cents per unit for a 5,000 mile journey across the ocean. The trade off is that where once cargo was visible…
On the 17 June 2013, the five year old container ship MOL Comfort started to break up off Mumbai, India. It was gradual, with steel plates buckling and letting water into the hold, before the cracks in the hull eventually lead to it snapping in half after the ship caught fire. Luckily the crew were able…
Shipping containers can last for decades. Some of the ones that were first made in the 1960s when the standardised ’20 Foot Equivalent Unit’ (TEU) was first devised are still sitting where they were left many years ago. There is a well-known oversupply of shipping containers around the world because they can be made so cheaply,…