5 Things You Probably Don’t Know About International Shipping

When you go to the grocery store, you don’t pick up fruits and vegetables from a cargo ship. If you see anything, it’s a truck delivering those goods, or maybe as you’re flying you see a cargo airplane unloading at the airport. This is why it seems counter-intuitive to think that 9 in every 10 products has been transported by ship. The reality is that ocean shipping drives the world economy.

A transport chain means that goods unloaded at the dock still have to be moved by a truck or by rail. That means most of these goods are moved by multiple modes of transportation. Yet 90-percent of the goods we buy have been shipped by…well, by ship.

1. International shipping is the lifeblood that drives many economies. We get resources and cheap products through international shipping, and we use it to send our own products and resources out into the world for sale. There are more than 1.6 million seafarers in the world.

2. There are also more than 52,000 merchant ships in the world. They are registered in more than 150 different nations.

3. Registries are often regional and have to do with the routes ships take. Therefore, Panama leads the world’s registries with 21-percent of the global fleet registered to the small country. Liberia is second at 12-percent, but if Hong Kong and China registries were combined, they would be second.

4. How does ocean shipping measure up in terms of pollution? It’s quite favorable. Pollution is measured across international transport by grams per metric ton. Container shipping is the most efficient form of shipping as measured by carbon dioxide emissions. A very large container vessel pollutes at a rate of 3 grams per metric ton for every kilometer. Compare this to trucks at 80 grams, or air transport at 435 grams. Of course, every mode is needed to create full supply and transport chains, and ships can’t compete with air transport for expedited shipping needs.

5. International shipping is measured by ton-miles, a rating that has essentially doubled since 2000. It’s gone up from slightly more than 30,000 tone-miles in 2000 to nearly 60,000 tons-miles today.