By Karl Deeter
Government is gung-ho about wanting us to use electric cars but it’s totally silent on the environmental impact of shipping, the reports says.
Container loading
Shipping containers created a uniformity that has gone hand in hand with globalisation, they tend to come in a 20ft or 40ft length with a width of 8ft and a height of 8.5ft.
If anybody wanted to end globalisation all they’d have to do is get rid of all the shipping containers, thankfully an impossible feat. Like many great ideas, they came from the business world.
American trucker Malcolm McLean came up with the idea and converted some ships so they could carry containers.
In 1956, most cargo was loaded and unloaded by hand, by stevedores.
Hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 a ton at that time. Using containers, it cost only 16 cents a ton to load a ship, a 36-fold saving. Not only that, the amount that a dock worker could load was also increased 30-fold.
The unions hated the idea as it posed a threat to their monopoly on controlling a port’s ability to load and unload ships, thereby their ‘toll road’ between land and vessel was largely removed.
Shift in logistics
That said, logistics was on its way toward a revolutionary change which is still shaping the world around us in amazing ways.
Nowadays about 90 per cent of all cargo in the world goes by ship, something we don’t always appreciate.
The cargo capacity of a container ship is measured in ‘TEUs’ or ‘twenty foot equivalent units’.
The six largest in the world are all owned by the Orient Overseas Container Line, the two largest each have capacity for more than 21,000 TEUs.
One massive tanker
It’s mind boggling to see such massive works of engineering, I recall seeing a super-tanker in South America and being almost unable to accept that it was real because it was just so massive.
To give you an idea of their scale, here’s a statistic I still marvel at: Just one mega-container ship gives off as many emissions as 50,000,000 cars. That’s right, one ship equals 50 million cars.
The world’s 15 largest ships put out more pollutants (nitrogen and sulphur oxide) than the entire world cars added up.
So when you are getting an NCT and you see your car tested for minute amounts of pollutant remember that super-ships use a heavy, dirty fuel and are virtually unregulated for pollution.
Biased policy
Something that makes me laugh is how our government wants electric cars (which still pollute because their batteries are filthy to dispose of, use rare earth metals and still need energy generated somewhere to charge them) but is totally silent on the environmental impact of shipping.
I’m all for affordable consumer goods and I like the fact that this country has ports where these things are brought in, but why do we have such biased standards.
This is yet another example of where we all have a broad eye and conscientious environmentalists on one hand and simultaneously ignorant Neanderthals on the other issues.
Ignorant green enthusiasts
Every person who tells me how ‘green’ they are still likes to take foreign holidays, they still buy goods carried on heavily-polluting container ships and buy fruit that has to be flown here.
The reason so many arguments are never black and white is because of this type of interlinking of cause and effect.
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Source: The Sun
