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Comment by bhy | Hacker News Reader

From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there's not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers.

As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.

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That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate use for these empty containers. People have tried to build houses with them, but I think one issue preventing widescale implementation of that use is that quite a few of them were originally holding some kind of material that would be hostile to human inhabitants. And living in a metal box in the Southern California summer would not be feasible without expensive air conditioning retrofits.

The limit of 2 was for off-port sites, within cities themselves. The article is wrong on that point.

We can get pretty far with passive solutions like internal and external insulation and painting the outside white. Burying them halfway into the ground would also give great benefits (albeit the trickier of the options) Perhaps we can even cover the roof with sod where available. May only need a minimal power active A/C.

The price of high quality paint, insulation, structural reinforcements, and exterior drainage sounds expensive.

I've never messed with containers because digging yourself out of the thermal hole of starting with a metal box still doesn't sound worth it.

Structural reinforcement is unnecessary - they can be stacked half a dozen high safely. A bit of back of the envelope tells me the cost of paint to coat the exterior of a standard 2 story suburban house is about $1500, so I estimate painting a 40 foot container should be about $400 max. Insulation should be about $1K. I imagine for drainage a buried septic tank is the best solution here.

I think the cost to retrofit an otherwise sound but unwanted container is less than the cost to purchase a used one. That is orders of magnitude lower than the cost to erect "standard" solutions to the housing problem.

It's gonna cost more than all of that to cut holes and install proper doors and windows. And after doing so now you're back to maybe needing structural reinforcement (those openings will require headers).

They don't have the strength to be buried. All of the strength is vertical in the corners for stacking. Once you cut into them for windows or more doors, you greatly reduce any strength. By the time you get done modifying it, it will cost more than traditional building materials.

(i like this dream, but it just isn't practical)

Another unmentioned problem is that the plywood floors are saturated with carcinogenic insecticides- and not a small amount. Source: I sealed floors for a container reuse project.

Make a rule that a ship is not allowed to leave with fewer containers than it drops. Containers may be full or empty, their choice.

I read recently that there’s such a great demand for containers in Asia right now that empty containers which used to be sent to our farms to fill with agricultural products to sell in Asia are instead being sent back empty. Maybe the consensus is outdated?

Agriculture has been aware of this for a while. It is more complex than that. Loaded containers need to consider balance of this ship, and grain is typically denser/heavier than what came over (most goods come over with a lot of air), so ships need to be carefully loaded, while only empty containers are easier to load because it is easier to balance the ship.

Making the above worse, even though containers are worth more in Asia, and containers of grain are worth a lot: to ship owners they get paid more for the Asia to US trip than the return trip, a ship that leaves the US unloaded (taking on ballast while unloading) and rushes back to Asia makes more money at the end of the year than a ship that waits around in LA to be reloaded with containers.

No wonder companies that aim to optimize/disrupt shipping are hiring so many ML engineers!

Maybe if the containers themselves were autonomous and mobile, and could optimize their own value… there’s a Black Mirror episode somewhere in that.

I was also thinking about this after reading the original thread.

If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers?

Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties.

But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.

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