The secret world of cargo ships

Rose George, excerpted in The Week:

For a while they held up the march of the box, as did geography and physics. Ships that carried many boxes would have to be bigger, with deeper draughts. New ports had to be built: New York’s maritime wharves — too shallow, too narrow — became useless, and the massive Greater Port of New York–New Jersey was constructed instead. But the rewards of containerization were too great for the dockers to defeat change. Before containers, transport costs ate up to 25 percent of the value of whatever was being shipped. With the extreme efficiencies that intermodality brought, costs were reduced to a pittance. A sweater can now travel 3,000 miles for 2.5 cents; it costs 1 cent to send a can of beer. Shipping a container can cost next to nothing, an invaluable advantage in hard economic times, when there is more supply than demand.

Looking forward to reading the book!