The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [85]
“Ship Sulfur Emissions Found to Strongly Impact Worldwide Ocean and Coastal Pollution: Trade-carrying cargo ships powered by diesel engines are among the world’s highest polluting combustion sources per ton of fuel...”24 “Pollution from Marine Vessels Linked to Heart and Lung Disease: Marine shipping causes approximately 60,000 premature cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths around the world each year...”25 “Commercial ships emit almost half as much particulate pollutants into the air globally as the total amount released by the world’s cars...”26 “Large Cargo Ships Emit Double Amount of Soot Previously Estimated...”27 These are just a few of the headlines based on research by scientists at Carnegie Mellon and other prestigious institutions related to the damage that cargo ships cause.
I’ve boarded these ships a couple of times in New York and Manila, when I worked for Greenpeace tracking hazardous-waste cargo. The word “ship” doesn’t remotely convey the reality of these monsters. Think gigantic apartment building lying on its side. I remember the first time I boarded one. Our team was wearing hard hats and official-looking black jackets that said “Toxic Trade Patrol,” with a pair of handcuffs dangling from our belts just in case we had to lock ourselves to an anchor chain to prevent the ship from setting off with hazardous cargo. When we insisted there was toxic waste hidden aboard the enormous vessel, the crew led us to the captain. We had to take an elevator to the eleventh floor to meet him.
Ships were huge then and they’re actually getting bigger now. In order to accommodate ever-growing heaps of Stuff crossing the ocean, a whole new class of container ship has been developed: the jumbo vessel. Many of these are longer than three football fields and big enough to contain thousands of containers, each of which could hold all the contents of a three-bedroom house.28 One little hitch is that most of the ports around the world can’t actually accommodate these supersize ships, meaning that harbors will have to be dredged and enlarged. Plans have already been approved to expand the Panama Canal to allow these vessels to move through it.29
It’s not just our hemisphere that is expanding its Stuff-distribution infrastructure. Between 2005 and 2010, China is planning to spend $70 billion annually for roads, bridges, and tunnels; $18 billion per year for railways; and $6.4 billion per year for ports.30 Three of the four highest-volume container ports in the world are in China already; Shanghai is at the top of the list, moving more than 350 million tons in 2007.31 Forty-three new airports were built there between 2001 and 2005, twenty-three of them in industry-heavy parts of western China.32 A primary goal of this new infrastructure is to lubricate the distribution of Stuff out of the country to international markets.
Once Stuff arrives in the United States, it generally moves around in trucks. In 2005, 77 percent of the total weight of freight moved within the United States was carried on trucks that racked up more than 160 billion miles, a number that, at least prior to the economic crisis, was expected to double in the next thirty years.33 Particularly around highway interchanges, in crowded sections of highways, and while waiting in line to enter or leave ports, those trucks often get caught in traffic and sit there, idling, for hours on end. In fact, a recent study found that American freight trucks spent 243 million hours per year stuck in congestion.34 Delays like these cost