JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The sprawling container yards just south of South Africa’s economic capital look like a giant’s Tetris game — thousands of brightly colored boxes piled on and around each other, stacked and re-stacked as the individual pieces are hauled away onto trucks and freight trains, bound for destinations across the country and the continent.
Over the past seven decades, shipping containers like these have become one of globalization’s most powerful agents, vastly reshaping the world economy by making possible a staggering flow of consumer goods across the world’s oceans. Containers — standardized, stackable and easily shuffled from ship to dockyard to truck — mean that it is no longer prohibitively expensive to source your shoes, coffee maker, and dog food from halfway around the world.
Today, at any given moment, there are at least 17 million of them bobbing across oceans or sitting in ports around the world, according to the World Shipping Council. Shipping containers now account for at least two thirds of the planet’s ocean-borne trade.
But if container shipping has left the world changed, it has also left something else behind — a whole lot of shipping containers. Some end their tenure as dented hulks of rust, too damaged to be destined for anything but the scrap yard. But many old shipping containers go on to improbable second lives, re-purposed as everything from houses to shopping malls to pizza delivery trucks.
This trend is visible perhaps nowhere more obviously than sub-Saharan Africa, a region with such a large container trade imbalance that some 80 percent of the containers that come full to its ports must leave empty — or be given a new use. In South Africa, there are container dormitories, corner stores, and shopping malls. In Botswana, one game reserve has a buried container where guests can peer in on wildlife at a nearby watering hole. In Sierra Leone, a container has been turned into a solar-powered mobile ” clinic in a can.”
Africa’s containers have more nefarious second uses, as well. In South Sudan, a temporary prison built from old containers has been slammed by international human rights groups for failing to meet basic humanitarian standards.
“Unless we do away with shipping altogether, these excess containers will probably always be with us,” says Greg Mitchell, inland director for Big Box Containers, a container re-purposing outfit just across the highway from Johannesburg’s container yards. “You can’t bury them or toss them back in the ocean, so the question becomes — what do we do with all of them?”
That wasn’t a problem U.S. trucking businessman Malcolm McLean gave a lot of thought to in 1953 when, frustrated by the glacial pace of overland freight transport in pre-interstate highway America, he fashioned a set of stackable aluminum boxes and outfitted a decommissioned tanker ship to shuttle boxes of cargo up and down the U.S. east coast. The invention seemed simple, but over the next two decades, it radically changed the face of global shipping. No longer did cargo have to be loaded and unloaded item by item by a cadre of dock workers. Containers could be stored out in the open and moved by cranes from ship to dockyard to truck. Suddenly, the main barrier to getting consumer goods around the world efficiently — cost — dissolved, and with it, many of the borders of industrial production and consumption.
That new system had definite winners and losers, says Marc Levinson, author of “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.” For much of Africa, the rise of the shipping container coincided with the bumpy early years of the continent’s independence and later, with the belt-tightening years of structural adjustment in the 1980s. In many countries, Levinson notes, the roads, railways, and ports needed to handle containers simply never got built, or if they did, they were poorly maintained. Container shipping, then, didn’t help connect Africa to the world so much as shove it further to the margins of the global economy.
“It is still extraordinarily expensive to move containers inland in many parts of Africa,” he says. “That has really made domestic manufacturing in much of Africa uncompetitive in the global market because it’s very costly to get things to the port — let alone onto ships.”
But for exactly that same reason, he notes, containers that made it to remote locations in the developing world have long had a habit of simply staying there, so onerous and expensive is the process of getting them back out.
Indeed, long before container architecture became a hip fad in European cities, Africans were finding that the very traits that made containers great for shipping — they were durable, stackable and surprisingly spacious — also made them great as stores, warehouses, and schools, among other uses. Chief among their advantages as buildings was that they arrived nearly ready made, with little construction or alteration required.
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For Mamushu Assefa, an Ethiopian shopkeeper in downtown Johannesburg, setting up shop in a container was a simple matter of hanging a few shelves, installing a deep fryer and a sign reading “FRESH HOT CHIPS,” and throwing open his container’s doors onto the busy street in front of him. His container is dented and flaking rust from its ceiling, and someone has inexplicably written the word “ROBOT” in large block letters along one of its sides. “Too small,” he gripes, but business is brisk and costs are low, he explains, so he can’t complain too much.
“In my experience, many Africans are used to working in low resource environments and are very entrepreneurial when it comes to reusing and recycling many items — including shipping containers,” says Rune Sorenson, managing director of container sales for Maersk Line, the world’s largest shipping container company. “There’s a ‘we can fix that’ attitude on the continent that really fits our business well.”
But if many containers are recycled in Africa by necessity, they are also, increasingly, re-purposed by design as well. In central Johannesburg, a brightly patterned dormitory built by stacking shipping containers on old grain silos looms above its rundown industrial neighborhood. And in the trendy suburb of Melville a few miles away, customers browse for macarons, ironic T-shirts, and artisanal coffee in a shopping mall made entirely of bright red shipping containers stacked like giant Lego blocks.
“For us, it’s about seeing potential where someone else might have seen scrap,” says Chris Ray, South Africa operations manager for Skateistan, a youth empowerment nongovernmental organization currently building an after-school center and skate park in downtown Johannesburg out of shipping containers donated by Big Box.
But if container buildings like Skateistan’s have a certain eco-chic appeal, there is probably little chance they will soon become the building blocks of Africa’s cities on a large scale, Levinson says.
“People find container building exciting and novel, but it isn’t necessarily any cheaper than building in other ways,” the author says. Indeed, many of the cost benefits of container building melt away when you start to re-size and shape them, or in the case of Skateistan, suspend them high above the ground like a massive floating cube.
For Sorenson at Maersk Line, though, that’s beside the point. The novelty and ingenuity of container buildings, after all, is part of their appeal.
“People see shipping containers every single day of their lives — on the road or standing in a port or coming in by ship. They’re just the wallpaper of life,” he says. “But these are more than just something to carry cargo. There are so many things they can become.”
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The Second Lives of Shipping Containers originally appeared on usnews.com
