[imagesource: Maxar Technologies]

So long, Ever Given, and thanks for the memes.

It was fun while it lasted, unless you were one of the companies losing out on huge sums of money, with major shipping routes disrupted for close to a week, at a cost of nearly $10 billion daily.

Eventually, that cost will end up hitting our pockets, because nothing in life is ever free, including memes.

With the Ever Given blockage dominating the news cycle, the importance of a functional shipping network was under the spotlight.

If you look around your office or home right now, there’s a pretty decent chance that much of what you see was at one point loaded onto a container and ferried on water.

Thankfully, there are companies that handle each step of the complicated process of getting cargo to and from the required destinations, so that’s one less headache for importers and exporters to deal with.

As The Conversation’s Anna Nagurney points out, the global economy runs on standardised shipping containers:

Today, an estimated 90% of the world’s goods are transported by sea, with 60% of that – including virtually all your imported fruits, gadgets and appliances – packed in large steel containers.

The rest is mainly commodities like oil or grains that are poured directly into the hull. In total, about US$14 trillion of the world’s goods spend some time inside a big metal box.

In short, without the standardized container – like the thousands that helped to keep the Ever Given stuck in the mud along the Suez Canal, snarling traffic for almost a week – the global supply chain that society depends upon would not exist.

We have American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean to thank for the standardised shipping container, which he designed in 1956, and is basically still in use today.

A length of 33 feet, which was soon increased to 35 (10,76 metres), and eight feet (2,43 metres) wide and tall, would lead to a huge reduction in the cost of loading and offloading containers from ships.

One of the key advantages is that whatever size a ship uses, they all, like Lego blocks, fit neatly together with virtually no empty spaces.

Image: Pieter Stam De Jonge/AFP/Ritzau Scanpix

This innovation made the modern globalized world possible. The quantity of goods carried by containers soared from 102 million metric tons in 1980 to about 1.83 billion metric tons as of 2017.

The Ever Given ship has a capacity of around 20 000 containers, and was carrying around 18 300 at the time it ran aground.

Designers are constantly working on larger container vessels, with greater capacity, and it’s estimated that by the year 2030, ships capable of carrying loads 50% larger than the Ever Given’s will be on open waters.

Whatever size the ship, importers and exporters want the peace of mind that comes with dealing in the best in the business, which is why South African company Berry & Donaldson has proven so popular over the past 58 years.

The full effect of the Suez Canal blockage will take months to play out, as the backlog enters ports around the world, and the international supply chain plays catch-up.

[source:conversation]