CONTAINER SHIPPING

There are two kinds of dry goods cargo: bulk and break bulk. Bulk dry goods are com-

modities such as coal and iron ore that can be poured into the ship’s storage area,

called the hold. Break bulk dry goods are placed in containers. In the old days, shippers

put break bulk cargo in barrels, buckets, bags, and just about every other kind of

custom-made packaging that you can imagine. A huge amount of manual labor was

involved in loading a ship with individual packages, which created many jobs for long-

shoremen and stevedores. Since the 1950s, a growing amount of break bulk freight has

been transported by container ships in standardized 20- and 40-foot sea containers (see

the following figure). These sea containers can be loaded and unloaded quickly by

means of gantry cranes, greatly increasing the speed and efficiency of global supply

chains.

If you ship an entire container from one destination to another, the transportation

mode is called full container load (FCL). Sometimes, several smaller shipments are com-

bined in a single container; this mode is called less than container load (LCL). Because it’s

complicated to combine multiple shipments in one container, LCL tends to be more

expensive than FCL.

Most sea containers are 40 feet long, but the size of container ships is measured by the

number of 20-foot containers they can carry. One 40-foot container takes the same

amount of room as two 20-foot containers, of course. The largest container ships can

carry almost 20,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs). These ships are too large for most

ports and canals.

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