Table of Contents:
Contents Page
Title page 1
Table of Contents 2
Summary 3
Introduction 4
Towards standards 5
Dimensions and payloads 5
Advantages and disadvantages 6
Markets 7
Types and Examples 7
Bibliography 13
Summary
Containerization has revolutionized cargo shipping. Today, approximately 90% of non-bulk cargo worldwide moves by containers stacked on transport ships; 26% of all containers originate from China. As of 2005, some 18 million total containers make over 200 million trips per year. There are ships that can carry over 14,500 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), for example the "Emma Mærsk", 396 m long, launched August 2006.
However, few initially foresaw the extent of the influence containerization would bring to the shipping industry. In the 1950s, Harvard University economist Benjamin Chinitz predicted that containerization would benefit New York by allowing it to ship industrial goods produced there more cheaply to the Southern United States than other areas, but did not anticipate that containerization might make it cheaper to import such goods from abroad. Most economic studies of containerization merely assumed that shipping companies would begin to replace older forms of transportation with containerization, but did not predict that the process of containerization itself would have some influence on producers and the extent of trading.
The widespread use of ISO standard containers has driven modifications i ...