scrap heap
a platform you can live with

In the last year or so, we’ve run some stories about unusual uses for transportation and distribution equipment: a basketball-tossing palletizer, homes made from shipping containers, and avant-garde furniture constructed from pallets, to name a few. Well, here’s another one, passed on by our resident pallet aficionado:

An article on the Web site GreenUpgrader.com explains how shipping pallets can be used to construct temporary housing in disaster areas. The concept originally was developed by architects I-Beam Design to house refugees in Kosovo. A transitional shelter measuring 10 by 20 feet would require about 80 pallets to build and cost some $500 all told. The design is especially cost-effective in disaster areas because construction teams can use pallets that arrive with relief supplies, say the architects. When no longer needed, the houses can be disassembled and recycled. They can also be modified to provide permanent housing.

I-Beam Design conducted a workshop at Ball State University in Indiana, where students and professors designed and built six houses in four days, GreenUpgrader reports. You can read more and see photos at http://greenupgrader.com/2387/recycled-pallet-house- disaster-relief-housing.

out-of-this world visibility

Those of you who really, really need to know exactly where your shipments are at all times might want to check this out. IHS, a company that provides data for such industries as aerospace, defense, and energy and parent of the economic research firm Global Insight, can track oceangoing ships by satellite. The satellites ping ships every six minutes to determine their location and track their exact path.

“It’s like Google Earth for ships,” said IHS Global Insight economist Scot Sigman during his presentation on global trade trends at the fall conference of the Coalition of New England Companies for Trade. Sigman showed a screen shot of the Western Hemisphere, with dozens of small yellow boxes representing ships, their paths up to that point depicted in one-day increments. He predicted that shippers would one day use the service to see in near-real time which ports are congested and whether or not ships are on schedule. Currently available only in the Western Hemisphere, the satellite tracking service is expected to be up and running worldwide in about 12 months.

To anyone who works in our field, the evidence of economic recession is everywhere: declining orders, growing inventories, empty trucks and containers, and slumping demand for capital equipment, to name just a few examples. It’s not just happening in the United States, either: China, the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, is suffering, too.

Reports out of China mention thousands of small and mid-sized factories shutting down because orders from North America and Europe have plummeted. And if factories aren’t manufacturing, it stands to reason that they no longer need the raw materials like scrap metal they ordered from overseas suppliers.

So what’s happening to all of those scrap metal orders? According to a Dec. 3, 2008, article by Shanghai-based reporter Adam Minter posted on The Atlantic Monthly’s Web site (“Scrapped,” www.the- atlantic.com/doc/200811u/china-scrap- metal), ocean containers filled with metal scrap are piling up on the docks in China. Chinese importers are balking at taking delivery of metals, whose prices have plunged by as much as 80 percent in the last few months. In some cases, they are reneging on contracts, writes Minter, who sat in on a meeting of scrap dealers and their Chinese customers.

The economic crisis could break a long-standing and lucrative trade loop: Containers filled with Chinese exports return laden with America’s scrap, which Chinese recyclers sell as raw material to manufacturers, who then export the finished products to the United States, ad infinitum … at least until now. With unclaimed containers accumulating in China and scrap shipments rapidly declining, the ocean carriers that have depended for decades on waste shipments to partially defray the cost of their westbound voyages have to be just as worried as the scrap dealers are.