I can’t keep from noticing the number of shipping containers that are accumulating greatly around most major RR Terminals. Are we (US) not returning those back to the terminating cities or are we getting into another recycling business from an abundance of these empty beast?
This is an interesting topic as shipping containers are re-cycled into homes, sheads, seasonal storeage for mall stores and work-site storage buildings. In reading of these alternative uses the bottom line is shipping costs. If there is no return load, then they sit as its too expensive to ship back than to build a new one. Lets see what others more in the know have to say.
Many of the ‘marine’ containers that import products from China were not shipped back as they was not as many loads going to china, and they did not want to pay for shipping them back! In the past few years that seems to have changed and China now sends them back(price of steel increased enough that it is cheaper for China to recycle?).
Many ‘domestic’ containers have a steel frame and a composite siding similar to what trailers have. I suspect they are controlled much better than the ‘marine’ containers have been.
Jim
What do you suppose that says about the balance of trade?
I wonder how long we can last consuming goods produced by others and producing ever less ourselves?
The cubic volume of goods traded says nothing about the relative value of goods traded.
Imagine that zone Alpha is a big producer of balsawood boxes, pre-inflated air mattresses and ping pong balls. Their trading partner, zone Omega, specializes in precious metals, miniature electronics and precision machine tools. Where would the empties pile up?
Over its entire productive lifetime, a major gold mine that made quite a few people rich produced just about enough 24kt gold to max the 70 ton load capacity of a Minnesota ore car - and wouldn’t have come anywhere near maxing its cubic capacity. Pure gold is a lot heavier than an equivalent volume of hematite.
OTOH, that same mine consumed trainloads of wire rope, rail, electrical cable, pipe, pumps, blowers - and a small forest of timber. Some of it, pulled out of the un-flooded part of the mine in recent years, covered acres of space around the old mine head - and that was just what hadn’t been carried off for scrap.
Chuck
The United States recorded a trade deficit of 38839 USD Million in March of 2013. Balance of Trade in the United States is reported by the U.S. Census Bureau. Historically, from 1992 until 2013, the United States Balance of Trade averaged -31991 USD Million reaching an all time high of -831 USD Million in February of 1992 and a record low of -67351 USD Million in August of 2006. The United States has been running consistent trade deficits since 1980 due to high imports of oil and consumer products. In recent years, the biggest trade deficits were recorded with China, Japan, Germany, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.
There was a time when it was cheaper to build a new container in the far east than it was to ship an empty back, so the empties piled up. Compounding the problem was the tendency of the RRs (and perhaps marine terminals) to give “free ground storage” as a perk for winning the business of a steamship line.
Actually I think FEMA owns most of them, secretly of course, it has something to do with the new order of boxcars disguised as autoracks….something about them being a ready on hand supply of “emergency housing” for a particular group of dissidents…I mean displaced folks.
You mean that trailer FEMA promised me for my golden years will really be a shipping container?
No, just that the ‘boxcar with shackles’ fleet is going intermodal…
The response so far then brings up another question. Who actually owns all those empty containers then if they are abandoned here by the orginal shippers?
They are not abandoned.
Containers have a useful life, depending on their design, and like most items that reach their shelf life, they are sold off once past that point.
The box is often owned by the group whose name is on the side, Uniglory, APL and such, or leased, just like railcars.
Most old or damaged containers are sold at scrap metal value, the “scraper” is smart of course, and locates his yard close to the terminal…the containers are often resold as storage units and such, those to badly damaged or worn for any other use are scrapped/recycled depending on the market.
When scrap prices go down, the boxes stack up.
We have a place here that will sell you a fairly usable 48’ for $2000.00, delivery is extra.
“We have a place here that will sell you a fairly usable 48’ for $2000.00, delivery is extra” Any 20’ containers? I expect, though that the transportation charges on one of those would be too much for our budget, and it would be necessary to take a metal fence down (and put it back up) to get it into our backyard. My daughter and I could use a little more storage room, even though she is not the packrat her mother was and I have been; we both had to downsize when we moved into the house we bought a few months ago.
Ed, please don’t give too many FEMA secrets away; ignorance is said to be bliss.
In Memphis, there are several companies that will sell you a 20’ container for just over $1000 delivered. This does not involve foundations or prep (the thing is delivered on a roll-off truck, probably one equipped to handle Dumpsters). Tare weight is about 6,000 lb, so not particularly difficult to jack up and put concrete under the corner castings and arrange leveling. Not terribly difficult to shift on the ground, either.
Part of the cheap market involved containers with some sort of racking damage that made them unfit for further use in intermodal operations; when used for static storage this may be unimportant even if the door gaps aren’t fully closed. When you jack-level it, any racking or twist doesn’t matter much.
Last I looked, there were 40’ containers available (again, delivered) for somewhere in that $2000 range. Most of that cost is involved in the delivery – as noted elsewhere in these forums, the marginal value in ‘backhauling’ a container economically is sometimes very small. Perhaps nowhere else in the United States is this more true than in the Memphis area, which is a major distribution point and hence sees many containers , but breaks bulk to warehouse much of what comes in. A couple of locations here have substantial numbers of idle containers, and are happy to get much above scrap value fo
Tweekers probably don’t have enough unfried brain cells to come up with that idea.[(-D]
For those of you that do buy a container one great piece of advice I got: Buy one with doors on both ends. They are much more flexible in use. they are some what scarce but doors at both ends have a higher reject rate to make a higher percentage available.
About two years ago I read an article about shipping containers going back to be refilled. It stated that since a ship has to go back overseas to pick up its next load of shipping containers it is losing money if empty. So there is a really low rate for carrying empty containers to be filled back to the manufacturing country.
That way containers get back and the shipping lines makes money to pay for the ship sailing back for the next load.
Don’t ask me where I read this, [:^)] but it was from an online search that I did.