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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

I believe the weight savings is from the materials/design, not the fact that it collapses.

And it seems the advantage of collapsing containers is that you could more efficiently shuffle the empties in complex shipment chains.

Would you rather ship 100 containers to the US and have 20 China-bound US shipments and 80 empties come straight back? Or ship 100 containers to the US, take on the 20 China-bound shipments, collapse the 80 empties and have room for 60 more elsewhere-bound US exports you can drop off on the way back?

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There aren't any complex shipping chains. Goods go china -> Europe/US the only thing that goes back is waste.

I can't see this helping. It costs more in a very price sensitive industry. Rollup doors means it isn't going to be used for shipping anything valuable or anything which then needs further onward shipping at the destination - are you going to have a truck full of DVD players going down the highway with canvas doors!

None of the existing handling systems is going to be able to deal with them, so you will need special cranes to load the collapsed ones - unless you load them inside regular containers.

> None of the existing handling systems is going to be able to deal with them, so you will need special cranes to load the collapsed ones

Not true. The photos clearly show the standard locking mechanism present (twistlock holes in corners). The procedure to tie several of them into a bundle is probably the same as with flat racks, and yes, those can be lifted by regular cranes.

They are regular containers when up, but when folded they are just big flat heavy pieces of freight - so you can load them as any other 40' long piece of freight but that means extra handling gear, forklifts, cranes etc at the customer's site to collapse them.

You can put them on flat rack, but those are a pain to handle as well. Now if eg. 10 of these folded flat could lock together and be the same height as a regular container and and be handled as a regular container that would be great.

Frankly when you can pay < $1000 for a new steel container in China nobody is going to be buying expensive, unproven composite containers however clever.

Unfortunately, managing US bound exports is probably not a problem right now unless it's containers full of toxic pcb material that we dump into foreign landfills.

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