The shipping industry, 10 facts
Take a look around. Every chair you are sitting on, to the mango you’re eating, it’s mostly made possible by the shipping industry. Shipping is one of the oldest industries in the world. Today, however, it plays as important a role as ever. The shipping industry is complex and there might be a few things you didn’t know yet.
Thanks to Rose George’s book Ninety Percent of Everything we have 10 fun facts about the shipping industry.
1. No Service
Around two-thirds of ship crews in the world have no means of communication while they are on the open sea. Only about 1 in 10 will have freely available Internet.
2. Expensive ships
The largest ships can cost over 200 million dollars to build.
3. Banana
The largest ships can store 745 million bananas in nearly 15,000 containers. That’s about one for every person in Europe and North America.
4. Seafarers
Around 1.5 million seafarers are employed by the global shipping industry
5. Boats
There are approximately 55,000 merchant ships carrying cargo around the world.
6. Inspections
Worldwide, only around 2% to 10% of containers are actually inspected. U.S. ports normally inspect roughly 5% of the 17 million containers arriving at the border every year.
7. Power
A container ship engine has about 1,000 times more power than a family car.
8. Average cost of shipping
To give you an example of how much it costs to ship something, a bicycle would be roughly 10 dollars while a soda can would be less than a penny.
9. 90 percent
Shipping is so big in fact that it constitutes roughly 90 percent of the world’s trade.
10. Type of ships
In the global fleet there are six types of ships: General cargo ships, bulk carriers, fishing vessels, container ships, passenger ships, and tankers.
Interested in more facts? Take a look the book of Rose George.
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