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Treehugger tells us of the largest temporary hotel built to date using shipping containers. They write:

We previously showed the Travelpod, an experimental prefab from Travelodge, and thought it was an interesting one-off. We were wrong; the company is looking seriously at prefab hotels and is building their first in the west London district of Uxbridge, right now. it is like a pop-up prefab:

“It could facilitate the creation of hotels on a temporary basis at times of peak demand in certain locations — such as festivals or sporting events,” the firm’s director of property and development Paul Harvey said. “A temporary structure to fill such a need would differ to the design of a permanent hotel but it could be built in as little as 12 weeks and removed quickly at the end of the event when the need is gone.”  Continue Reading…

Find more interesting uses for shippign containers HERE.

Only in the eclectic world of the maritime blogosphere could the best provider of interesting content find its roots in a parking problem. Such is the case with our friends at Telstar Logistics who bring us a surprising update on the nation’s trade imbalance… there is a shortage of shipping containers. The Wall Street Journal writes:

Finding enough of the big metal boxes used to be a cinch, because the nation’s massive hunger for imports meant they were constantly arriving and stacking up from Long Beach, Calif., to Long Island, N.Y. Shipping companies typically scoured the country for anyone willing to fill outgoing boxes. But with the slump in the value of the dollar making U.S. goods more attractive to foreign buyers and many overseas economies continuing to hum, the tide has shifted in recent months. Trade figures being released Thursday are expected by many economists to show further growth in exports.

Shipping containers — and the way they’re handled — reflect how the U.S. interacts with the global economy, which is one reason the problem has emerged now. For years, the U.S. crafted a trading system that was designed to pull in masses of imported consumers goods such as sneakers and VCRs as efficiently as possible from countries like China. Far less was expected to flow the other way.

What has happened now has thrown a wrench into the works. Cutbacks by U.S. consumers have slowed the growth of imports, while the weak dollar is making the U.S. into an export machine. Meanwhile, the places where most of these exports are originating are far from where boxes are being unpacked and soaring energy costs make it too costly to just load them on trucks and move them around.

“There are some places, particularly in the Midwest, where there’s a complete lack of containers,” says Philip Damas, the head of container research at Drewry Shipping Consultants in London. […]

Analysts say shipping costs are rising, too. Mr. Damas, the London-based consultant, says the cost of shipping a 40-foot container from the West Coast to China is now $1,500, up at least 20% in the past year. In many cases, boxes that previously would be sent to inland locations never leave the coast.

The problem surfaced about six months ago and can be traced to a confluence of factors, beyond the slump in the dollar. For one, the global commodity boom has increased the cost of shipping items by bulk, which in turn has pushed more goods into containers.

It doesn’t help that containers don’t tend to flow to places that make most U.S. exports. More imports to the U.S. are consumer goods, which are often unloaded near retailers and warehouses in large cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. In the case of Chicago, many containers come off ships from Asia and onto trains destined for “inland” destinations. But U.S. commodity exports, such as cotton and corn, are grown far from those hubs. Continue Reading…

For those interested in photography the above photo was taken by Telstar and posted to Flickr’s Big Metal Box group a must see collection of images related to…. you guessed it; shipping containers. Their must see slideshow can be found HERE.

The data visualization above represents the worlds 10 largest container shipping companies by TEU capacity. We created this chart using IBM’s Many Eye’s project which we enjoy using since it gives us a clear, easy to understand and interactive picture of numeric data. Plus it looks pretty cool.

Want to know which company has the largest number of ships or the highest percentage of the overall market? If so then click on the picture above for the interactive version.

For those who prefer more traditional data:

(Source: 2006 BRS Report)

CargoLaw.com brings us the 2006 incident photos of the M/V Jeppesen Maersk: [Continue Reading →]

WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTO

This week’s incident photo is not for the faint of heart. Bob Couttie’Maritime Accident Casebook gives the details:

The following photo is a disturbing image and we gave considerable thought to whether or not its publication would serve a useful purpose. It’s from the Blue Oceana website and tells more than any official report possibly could of the need to be safety conscious around containers. It is from an accident in Malaysia in 2005. As the Blue Oceana makes clear, it’s a continuing problem.

CLICK HERE for the photo.