DC Velocity - September 2012

inbound

It was a long, hot summer, but that didn’t keep providers of logistics and material handling products and services from pressing ahead with their community service and charitable giving efforts. Here are some recent examples: Mitzvahs of the month

▪ Clark Material Handling Co. will donate pallet jacks to six nonprofit organizations in its home state of Kentucky. The lift-truck manufacturer has long engaged in philanthropy and continues to support many charitable organizations in the areas of health, homelessness, education, and more.

▪ BearCom and Motorola Solutions, providers of wireless communications equipment and solutions, will be the lead sponsors of the 2012 AUSA Wounded Warrior Golf Classic, a golf tournament organized by the North Texas Chapter of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA). The October tournament will benefit Heroes on the Water, which helps injured military personnel relax, rehabilitate, and reintegrate with society through fishing and other outdoor activities; and Operation Once in a Lifetime, which provides financial and moral support to U.S service members and their families as well as to veterans.

▪ The board of directors of the Material Handling Education Foundation Inc. (MHEFI) recently announced its 2012–2013 scholarship winners. Twenty-eight scholarships totaling $86,750 were issued for the current academic term. Scholarships were provided by the Material Handling Industry of America’s product councils as well as by a number of equipment manufacturers and consulting firms. Information about both the winners and the donors can be found at www.mhia.org/about/mhefi/2012.aspx.

▪ Hawaii’s Matson Inc. has established the Matson Foundation to administer the ocean carrier’s corporate giving programs. The foundation will contribute funds, material goods, and services to not-for-profit, charitable, and community organizations where Matson has business operations, including Hawaii, Guam, and the continental United States. Areas of interest include maritime environment and ocean resource conservation, education, human services, culture and arts, and civic and community programs. ;

Over the years, we’ve seen a variety of creative uses for ocean containers, the steel 20- and 40-foot “boxes” that travel around the globe by ship, rail, and truck. The most common applications include places for people to live and work—homes, temporary retail stores, and medical clinics in remote areas. Now comes word of a very different use for the big boxes: as greenhouses for growing vegetables.

You might think that a watertight steel box with no windows would be a less-than-ideal environment for growing lettuce or tomatoes. But Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, proprietors of Freight Farms in Worcester, Mass., say they have it all worked out. According to an article in The Boston Globe, the two have outfitted a shipping container with plastic-and-foam “growing channels” on the walls, a drip-irriga-tion system on the ceiling, and LED grow lights. The project is still in the test stage, but the partners said they hope to sell greenhouse containers to schools, restaurants, or food distributors by year’s end.

Another company, Higher Ground Farm, also has plans to develop greenhouse containers. Co-founder John Stoddard told The Globe that he likes the containers because they can be easily moved around a city. Another advantage of “container gardening”: It minimizes travel distances, greatly reducing in-transit damage and the produce’s carbon footprint. ; “Container gardening” of a different sort

PHOTO COURTES Y OF APPLE

These days, it seems like everybody on the planet owns at least one Apple product, be it an iPhone, iPod, iPad, or Macintosh computer. The company’s ubiquitous inventions have forever changed consumer culture. Less widely recognized is the impact Apple’s product releases have had on the transportation market.

Whenever it introduces a new product, Apple ships millions of the
item by air to its own stores and other retail outlets. According to a
recent commentary by John Manners-Bell, CEO of the London-
based research firm Transport Intelligence, Apple’s demand for air-
cargo capacity is so great that it is “able to skew rates across a large
proportion of the global air cargo market.”
When the company launched its newest iPad in March 2012,
Manners-Bell reports, airfreight rates from China to the United States
jumped by 20 percent. He warns that a similar rate spike could occur
late this month if, as rumor has it, Apple ships not only its next-gen-
eration iPhone but also the iPad Mini and a redesigned iPod Nano.

Apple’s ability to command air-cargo capacity is another concern. Manners-Bell notes that in March, freight forwarders struggled to serve their customers in part because carriers had reduced their capacity in response to weak volumes. That poses cost and service risks, not only for shippers but also for forwarders. “Rising prices at a time of falling volumes will impact severely on forwarders’ gross margins,” he writes, “unless, of course, they are fortunate enough to be working for Apple.”;