Summary
After the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal last month, we ask: are container ships too big? How much bigger can they get? To answer those questions we speak to Aslak Ross, head of marine standards at the world’s largest container shipping line, Maersk. Jan Hoffman, head of trade and logistics at the UN's Conference on Trade and Development, explains that economies of scale have led to the ships getting bigger and bigger. And Evert Lataire, head of maritime technology at Ghent University, describes how he assesses whether a mega ship can fit into a port, or through a canal.
Picture: the Ever Given container ship lodged sideways in the Panama Canal. Credit: Getty Images.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Zaragoza. |
| 0:06.4 | Coming up, after a monster cargo ship got stuck in the Suez Canal last month, |
| 0:11.0 | why have container ships been getting ever bigger? |
| 0:14.1 | There's a lot of focus on the big ships being unsafe. |
| 0:17.5 | In fact, you could also turn it around. |
| 0:19.1 | In many, many aspects, The big ships are much safer |
| 0:22.1 | than the container vessels that were predominantly used 20 years ago. But what about the world's |
| 0:27.6 | rivers, canals and ports that have to adapt to accommodate these ever bigger ships? |
| 0:32.1 | We do recommend to the public sector, to the port authorities, maritime authorities, |
| 0:38.0 | those who do the concessions of ports, |
| 0:39.8 | don't bend down too much on being able to attract ever bigger ships. |
| 0:44.0 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.6 | Just look at that. It's incredible, like a wall of steel in the middle of the sea. |
| 0:55.6 | That is the world's largest container ship, about to dock in the UK for the first time. |
| 1:01.1 | So much of what we have arrives this way. |
| 1:04.4 | The clothes we're wearing, the food we're eating, probably the television you're watching this on now, all came by ship. |
| 1:10.6 | The BBC's Richard Westcott there, |
| 1:12.7 | sailing alongside the CSCL Globe cargo ship as it came into a UK port back in 2015. It's a monster |
| 1:20.5 | of a vessel, stacked high with 20-foot containers. Ships this size will soon be a regular |
| 1:26.5 | site in our ports, running an endless loop between Asia and Europe. |
| 1:31.4 | The next time you buy something, it may well have arrived like this. |
| 1:35.9 | At the time of filming, that ship was the largest cargo vessel in the world, large enough to make the news when it docked here in the UK. |
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