TORONTO — Shortly after North Carolina trucker Malcom McLean introduced the first standard-size intermodal shipping container in 1956, an empty box probably sat idle at a port or terminal — a lonely harbinger of things to come.

Today, empty containers sit stacked by the hundreds of thousands all over the globe, waiting to be brought back into service. Often it will take an empty movement or two before that happens.

The bane of the international shipping community, the costs of empty repositioning are enormous. It’s estimated that 20 percent of containers on the high seas at any given moment are traveling empty. And the situation is as bad or worse on the highways and rails.

It’s a cost pegged by Drewry Shipping Consultants to be about $7 billion a year to the global logistics community.

Solving this problem is not an easy proposition.

One of the most common ideas has been to fold empty containers to minimize their footprint. Entrepreneurs have been attempting this for decades, but it’s never really caught on, largely because the boxes they designed cost too much, weigh too much, or take too long to assemble.

And of course a lot of them failed the stress test. Containers are often stacked 10 high, fully loaded, which means the container at the bottom has to be able to support 350 tons of weight.

Recent developments in lighter-weight steel have led to innovations that have been making international headlines recently.

One of the most promising is the new "Cargoshell" collapsible plastic shipping container, developed by Rene Giesbers, a heating-systems engineer from the Netherlands. 

Folding container technology is improving,
but can probably only solve a small
part of the empty repositioning conundrum.

Not only does his prototype fold into a quarter of its size, but its newly engineered fiberglass composite shell gives the strength of steel, with only 75 percent of the weight — something which seems to have prompted interest from shippers.

If it gets clearance from those who regulate these things, and if it finds a champion in one or two of the major ocean carriers, it could go a long way to solving the enduring problem of empty repositioning.

At $4000 a unit, the Cargoshell would cost about double to make, but the savings would come with use.

There’s others. Boston-based Compact Container Systems, meanwhile, has also come up with a design for a container that folds by hinging at its side walls.

Simon Bosschieter, a 28-year-old engineer who is also from the Netherlands, has designed a steel alloy container with folding walls that slide into each other. His company, Holland Container Innovations plans to put its first containers on the market by this summer.

Some say that folding containers in order to move them more easily appears to accept the fact that empty containers will always be with us. Maybe they will, but shouldn’t more focus be on dramatically reducing the distance they travel empty?

It is indeed a ‘riddle’ as Peter Ladouceur of CN Rail described it in a recent speech to shippers in Toronto.

It stems, of course, from an imbalance of product movements — not just globally between Asia and North America, but domestically between the Toronto-Montreal corridor and the pockets of resource-oriented activity at the peripheries of the nation from which product tends to flow.

In his speech, Ladouceur urged exporters to start talking to importers because between the two of them they can go a long way to solving this conundrum. It’s not so much about the brawn of collapsing containers to a quarter their size. It’s about the brain of finding new ways to communicate, cooperate, plan, and leverage information technology, he said.

It’s a challenge, for sure, Ladouceur said, but one that Canadians are up for.

“If we can figure this one out we’ll be ahead of the pack,” Ladouceur said.

— by Allan Janssen