Coronavirus remains the main emergency at the moment, but, among the most prominent news, there are a lot of reports about the supply chain disruptions all over the world.
The supply chain crisis is actually linked with the pandemic: consumer sales dramatically increased with lockdowns that caused an overwhelming demand for a wide range of imported products.
At the same time, there were shortages of trucks, drivers and warehouse workers with some members of the workforce recovering from Covid as well. But, as demands soar again with economy restarting after Covid, things are getting even worse: it is estimated that 8.5% of global constainer shipping is stalled around ports, twice as much as in January.
At the moment there are backlogs of cargo ships sitting idle in the waters outside ports all over the world: the number of cargo ships in southern California reached an all-time high a few days ago, there were for example over 100 ships waiting to unload thousands of containers outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach earlier on this week. But the situation is the same also at ports in New York and Savannah, Georgia.
In the UK the problem is exasperated by Brexit and the ongoing supply chain disruption led to empty shelves in supermarkets and queues at petrol stations.
Last month, the UK government agreed to grant 5,000 temporary visas to non-UK lorry drivers while British ministers recently announced plans to allow EU lorry drivers to make an unlimited number of pick-ups and drop-offs within a fixed period (two weeks) to try and solve the supply chain problems. The temporary relaxation of cabotage rules applies to all kinds of goods, but in particular to the food supply chains and the regulations should help ease some product shortages.
Yet this international problem is expected to continue into next year. The supply chain disruptions are going to have the most tragic impacts on the environment and public health as the ships have diesel-fuelled engines that emit pollutants while they're anchored outside the ports (in normal times, the ports create more than 100 tons of smog and other cancer-causing contaminants each day).
Raising awareness to the supply chain crisis, and to its consequences is therefore important and it is possible to do so also by looking at projects and collections inspired by shipping containers or reusing them.
There have been quite a few architecture studios all over the world that have tried to launch projects to recycle shipping containers, employing them for temporary shops and cafes, office spaces and even flats.
As you may remember from a previous post, last year Italian Professor Carlo Ratti, founder of Carlo Ratti Associati studio and Director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), collaborated with an international group of architects, designers, engineers, doctors, military experts and NGOs to develop an open-source project called "CURA" - an acronym standing for "Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments".
CURA consisted in converting 20-foot intermodal shipping containers into plug-in Intensive-Care Units (ICU) for COVID-19 patients.
Fashion has equally been inspired by shipping containers: Chanel's 15th Métiers d'Art Collection, showcased in December 2017 in Hamburg, Germany, combined industrial and architectural inspirations.
The stretchy knits with geometrically ordered rusty orange, red and blue grid patterns were inspired by the rows of coloured cargo containers you can easily spot in commercial ports. This inspiration became clearer also in the bags matched with these designs that were shaped like the cargo containers in Hamburg's dockside.
After seeing the bags people familiar with art and architecture may have immediately thought about the works of Joshua Smith, the Australia-based miniaturist and former stencil artist.
Well-known for his reproductions of derelict buildings and other assorted urban features, Smith creates from cardboard, paper, plastruct and fabric, miniature cargo containers inspired by the ones in the Hong Kong docks.
A shipping container-shaped bag may not help us solving the port congestions and supply chain issues, but we may use these inspirations to remind us about the current supply chain crisis and to inspire us to think about creative solutions to container congestion plaguing ports all over the world.
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