The average person on the street might guess his cheap shoes were made in China, or that the oil in his car comes from the Middle East. But almost no one understands how these goods end up where they are.
In her new book, Ninety Percent of Everything, investigative journalist Rose George examines the global freight shipping complex–the all-but-hidden mess of an industry that undergirds the entire global economy yet somehow manages to avoid major scrutiny for its environmental and labor practices.
“We’re all worried about our fair-trade coffee and about sweatshop workers, so we want to buy ethically sourced clothes. But none of that applies to how the goods are shipped,” George tells Co.Exist.
George managed to get access–extremely rare for an outsider–to travel aboard a container ship belonging to Dutch Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk. In the book, she describes several high-seas journeys as she called in ports from Singapore to Rotterdam and cruised the Indian Ocean on patrol for pirates. What struck her the most was how truly isolated the seafarers were aboard their ships for months at a time–far from any free communication, and, really, any rule of law.
Here are 10 of the most fascinating facts and statistics she highlights.
The biggest container ships can hold 745 million bananas in 15,000 containers. That’s one for every European and North American.
- Line up the containers belonging to Maersk alone, and they would stretch nearly halfway around the planet. Stack them up, and they’d reach to 7,530 Eiffel Towers. Unload their cargo onto trucks, and the traffic would stretch 60 miles.
- The biggest container ships can hold 745 million bananas in 15,000 containers. That’s one for every European and North American.
- In 2009, the largest 15 ships emitted as much greenhouse gases as 760 million cars–or about two cars for every American.
- Right now, there are at least 20 million containers crossing the world.
- Two-thirds of ship crews have no means of communication off the ship. Only 12% have freely available Internet.
- Females make up only 2% of seafarers. Filipinos make up more than one third of all crews worldwide, with 250,000 at sea.
- In 2010, Somali pirates held 544 seafarers hostage. Every year, 2,000 seafarers die at sea, with more than two ships lost each day. In 2012, the attack rates on seafarers exceeded the rate of violent assaults in South Africa, the highest-crime country in the world.
- Worldwide, between 2% to 10% of containers are physically inspected. U.S. ports typically inspect 5% of the 17 million containers they receive a year.
- Shipping is cheap. So cheap that, rather than fillet its own fish, it is cheaper for Scotland to send its cod 10,000 miles over to China to be filleted and returned to Scotland.
- The 360 commercial U.S. ports took in international goods worth $1.73 trillion in 2011. The U.S. relies on shipping to bring in two-thirds of its oil supply.