|
 |
 |
|
 |
| |
The Box That Makes
the World Go Round
More than 3,500 cargo ships are sailing the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans today. They are loaded down with about 15 million containers. Like beads lined up on a necklace, these huge vessels ply their transcontinental routes. And their number rises every week. The container market is growing nearly three times as fast as the world economy. If the experts are to be believed, the sky's the limit.
A system of self-propelling factors powers the growth: Globalization drives containerized cargo, and containers fuel globalization. Steel boxes have become the building blocks of the new global economy.
Containers can hold just about anything: frozen beef going from Buenos Aires to Rotterdam, LCD monitors heading from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, and even subway cars being exported from Hamburg to Shanghai. The ships, too, are expanding in tandem. Vessels that accommodate 6,000 to 7,000 standard containers -- or TEUs ("twenty-foot equivalent unit") as they are known in the industry -- are becoming a common sight on the high seas. And designers have already dreamed up huge freighters capable of accommodating 13,000 TEUs.
Container capacity (of ships, ports, etc) is measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU, or sometimes teu). A twenty-foot equivalent unit is a measure of containerized cargo equal to one standard 20 ft (length) × 8 ft (width) × 8.5 ft (height) container. In metric units this is 6.10 m (length) × 2.44 m (width) × 2.59 m (height), or approximately 39 m3.
Most containers today are of the 40-ft variety and thus are 2 TEU. 45 ft containers are also designated 2 TEU. Two TEU are referred to as one forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU). These two terms of measurement are used interchangeably.
"High cube" containers have a height of 9.5 ft (2.9 m), while half-height containers, used for heavy loads, have a height of 4.25 ft (1.3 m).
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
