How our ships got so large
Expanding global appetite for electronics, clothes, toys and others grew container vessels
The traffic jam at the Suez Canal will soon begin easing, but behemoth container ships such as the one that blocked that crucial passageway for almost a week and caused headaches for shippers around the world aren’t going anywhere.
Global supply chains were already under pressure when the Ever Given, a ship longer than the height of the Empire State Building and capable of carrying furnishings for 20,000 apartments, wedged itself between the banks of the Suez Canal last week. It was freed Monday, but it left behind “disruptions and backlogs in global shipping that could take weeks, possibly months, to unravel,” according to A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company.
The crisis was short, but it was also years in the making.
For decades, shipping lines have been making bigger vessels, driven by an expanding global appetite for electronics, clothes, toys and other goods. The growth in ship size, which sped up in recent years, often made economic sense: Bigger vessels are generally cheaper to build and operate on a per-container basis. But the largest ships can come with problems, not only for the canals and ports that have to handle them, but for the companies that build them.
“They did what they thought was most efficient for themselves — make the ships big — and they didn’t pay much attention at all to the rest of the world,” said Marc Levinson, an economist and author of “Outside the Box,” a history of globalization.
Despite the risks they pose, however, massive vessels still dominate global shipping. According to Alphaliner, a shipping-data firm, the global fleet of container ships includes 133 of the largest ship type — those that can carry 18,000 to 24,000 containers. Another 53 ships are on order.
The world’s first commercially successful container trip took place in 1956 aboard a converted steamship, which transported a few dozen containers from New Jersey to Texas. The industry has grown steadily in the decades since, but as global trade accelerated in the 1980s, so did the growth of the shipping industry — and ship size.
In that decade, the average capacity of a container ship grew by 28%, according to the International Transport Forum, a unit of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Container-ship capacity grew again by 36% in the 1990s. In 2006, Maersk introduced a massive new vessel, the Emma Maersk, which could hold about 15,000 containers, almost 70% more than any other vessel.
Today, the largest ships can hold as many as 24,000 containers — a standard 20-foot box that can hold enough produce to fill one to two aisles in a grocery store.
The growth of the shipping industry and ship size has played a central role in creating the modern economy, helping to make China a manufacturing powerhouse and facilitating the rise of everything from e-commerce to retailers such as Amazon.
“Ultra Large Container Vessels are extremely efficient when it is about transporting large quantities of goods around the globe,” Tim Seifert, a spokesman for HapagLloyd, a large shipping company, said in a statement. “We also doubt that it would make shipping safer or more environmentally friendly if there would be more- or less-efficient vessels on the oceans or in the canals.”