The Red Blood Cells of the Consumer Economy

The shipping container is one of the most transformative design innovations of the twentieth century. An engineer named Keith Tantlinger made this revolutionary mode of transport possible in the mid-1950s when he created a way to stack containers on top of one another, for efficient shipment and rapid loading and unloading by crane. Not only was Tatlinger’s design cheap and easy to build, its standardization allowed containers to be imported and exported seamlessly across nations and shipping lines.

Our obsession with stuff and consumerism—made possible by these stacked metal boxes—is not going away. Between 1980 and 2017, the number of goods carried by shipping containers increased from 102 million metric tons to about 1.83 billion metric tons, and it’s estimated that 80% of all goods are now carried by sea.

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Capacity of Container Ships in Seaborne Trade

In dead weight tonnage

Sources: UISL; Marine Flottenkommando via Statista.