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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Modern container cargo ships are huge. Even though in aggregate the absolute pollution is a big numbers, when you amortize over the volume, shipping an item has about a very close to zero impact on environment.

And this is not some hand-waving explanation either, since other factors dominates the environmental impact (for example, shipping from Newegg to your office is probably a magnitude more polluted), it doesn't matter if the factory is in China or the US. This applies to a lot more things, even lower value stuffs like fruit. Which is why local produce might have more environmental impact than imported mass produce fruits, though I don't have a citation for this on hand.

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I would add that the numbers are possible to compare, but container shipping is pretty efficient.

One container from Shenzhen to Oakland (~10,000 km) is going to be the CO₂ equivalent of burning 60 gallons of gasoline.

"According to Irene Blooming, a spokeswoman for the European environmental coalition Seas at Risk, the fuel used in oil tankers and container ships is high in sulfur and cheaper to buy compared to the fuel used for domestic land use. "A ship lets out around 50 times more sulfur than a lorry per tonne of cargo carried."[1]

"Of total global air emissions, marine shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxides and 9% of the sulfur oxides."[1]

"One source of environmental stresses on maritime vessels recently has come from states and localities, as they assess the contribution of commercial marine vessels to regional air quality problems when ships are docked at port.[33] For instance, large marine diesel engines are believed to contribute 7 percent of mobile source nitrogen oxide emissions in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. Ships can also have a significant impact in areas without large commercial ports: they contribute about 37 percent of total area nitrogen oxide emissions in the Santa Barbara, California area, and that percentage is expected to increase to 61 percent by 2015."[1]

" Maritime transport accounts for 3.5% to 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide.[1][27] According to the World Bank, in 2022, the shipping industry's 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions make it "the sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter worldwide, ranking between Japan and Germany."[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_shi...

While this is true, if you were to calculate the last-mile carbon cost it would be much, much higher.

A full container of goods costs about 60 gallons of diesel to ship across the world.

That same container costs 60 gallons to move 360 miles from a port.

Delivery vehicles drive approximately 0.8 miles per package delivered, and get around 10-20mpg delivering, so each package costs 1/10 to 1/20 of a gallon of fuel to deliver from the depot to your door. Assuming there are 4000 eventual packages in a container, the last mile delivery for the container is 200-400 gallons.

Obviously this is not the case where the final destination is a large receiver, but even then there are still significant transportation impacts in most cases.

I hate the fact that when I read the part about sulfur dioxide I’m like, well, that’s good at least lol. There’s some evidence that cleaning up ship emissions might be a significant contributor to recent sea temperature acceleration, since the cloud seeding effect from ocean shipping has been drastically reduced.

Do you have a source for energy use for container ship vs trucking?

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/transportation.pdf

End of page 129, start of page 130 (page 3 and 4 in pdf file).

Truck used twice as much energy consumption as all marine vessels. Dry cargo (there are a bunch of ships shipping oils and LNG too) is generally around 60% of marine vessels.

It’s been a while since I did this comparison, but I’m pretty sure a little poking around on Google will get you close.

They hurt recently phased out the sulfur fuel, and it's a whole ironic thing, it's actually causing Temps to go up because the sulfur clouds were actually helping us.

https://youtu.be/dk8pwE3IByg

It's like that whole global dimming thing with con trails after 9/11 but with ship trails.

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