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Comment by MauranKilom | Hacker News Reader

Truck-loadings-per-hour will increase, but that does not help shrink the buffer if every truck picking up a container also brings back an empty one.

Increasing the buffer size is a temporary relief, but clearly the underlying problem is an ever-increasing number of containers (empty or full), or we wouldn't have gotten into this situation.

If we could dispose of the empty containers somewhere then this bottleneck would cease to exist - trucks could just haul away containers at max throughput. I gather that it's become harder to ship back empty containers though, and presumably just scrapping them is not a sound solution in the long run either.

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> I gather that it's become harder to ship back empty containers though, and presumably just scrapping them is not a sound solution in the long run either.

This is not obvious to me. The same ships are going back to fetch more goods, so why would they want to go empty?

Surely the cost of manufacturing a new container is (or should be) less than the cost of putting it on an empty boat.

> the cost of manufacturing a new container is (or should be) less than the cost of putting it on an empty boat.

If you can prove that considering all externalities you would win a Nobel prize in Economic Sciences.

It’s time to load. An empty ship may be halfway back to China to get a new (overpriced) load before a similar ship is loaded with empties.

Does the port charge container owners for storing empties? Ramp up the storage fee, and voila... empty containers go back on empty boats that would otherwise make the return trip with no load. Container owners will find that shipping them back with a reasonable premium to keep ships around long enough to pick up the empties eventually costs less than storing them at the port.

Aside, I'd love to have an empty container on my parcel out in the desert, if there's such a huge glut of empties, why does one in any condition cost $10k, without delivery? If anyone has a source for empty containers for sale at reasonable prices, I'd love to have their contact info.

you can find containers for $400 online, maybe even free, if you have a truck to pick up..

I've been tempted to pay someone to pour a concrete pad and buy a few to try and build a cabin on. With prices that low it's worth looking at.

Do careful research. Many have done that, but the negatives of containers for that purpose are rarely stated.

Building a cabin on top of containers would seem to resolve a lot of problems ascribed to building into containers.

I assume a port would be designed to have a buffer of empties (or filled containers) ready to load.

Considering the price and availability of steel, i'm kind of suprised nobody is trying to scrap and recycle them.

Probably china uses low quality steel to make those containers. But you could melt containers and they would take up less space to ship back to China

Or just make collapsible containers. Bolt the corners (where all the strength is) on right and then take them apart. Needs careful engineering work, but it seems like it should be possible to standardize then and then machines at either end can take them apart and stack into a standard container dimension.

Scrapping containers is a terrible idea. We need reuse those containers in 2 weeks. The supply chain is a loop. The pipeline is just stuffed up right now and we need to stash empties for a bit while we unload the ships that are backed up.

This seems to be why he suggests a place other than the port to dump empties.

It would be better to require that the ships carry away as many empties as fit aboard.

If it's true that ships are refusing to load empties simply because it's more profitable to skip the loading times, then a requirement could actually fix things in the medium term.

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