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The South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries has received approval for a 'new' concept that makes throwing containers overboard a thing of the past.

South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries has received approval for a 'new' concept that makes overboard containers a thing of the past, while the containers on board do not even have to be secured. A similar innovation also came from Dutch soil at shipping company Nedlloyd in the XNUMXs.

In the concept, the containers are stacked on top of each other in so-called 'cell guides'. A 'cell guide' consists of four vertical rails in which a container can move freely up and down. Compare it to an elevator in an elevator shaft. The big advantage is that the containers can never move in a horizontal direction. As a result, they can never slide off the container ship.

Moreover, containers never have to be lashed (sealed) again. This saves time during loading and unloading. Cell guides make container transport safer. The chance that containers from the ship end up in the sea is virtually nil.

'Open top'

In the XNUMXs, the Dutch shipping company Nedlloyd successfully applied cell guides to a series of new 'open-top' container ships such as the Nedlloyd Asia. At the time, the Netherlands provided the necessary regulations for the International Maritime Organisation, the UN body for maritime affairs.

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An 'open-top' container ship can transport approximately five thousand containers. Far less than today's largest container giants carrying twenty-four thousand containers. The number of containers that can be stacked on top of each other is limited. Too many containers on top of each other means too much weight.

Ordinary container ships

On normal container ships, however, the containers are stacked on top of each other in two 'storeys', above deck and below deck: stacks on top of the hatches and below these stacks on top of the double bottom of the ship. The 'open-top' container ships have no hatches and the containers are stacked in one 'floor' on the double bottom of the ship. The Dutch cell guide on open-top container ships therefore had no chance of success.

The result is that with an 'open-top' container ship the total number of containers one above the other cannot become as large as with a normal container ship. In a vertical sense, therefore, fewer containers can be transported. The 'open-top' container ships therefore did not fit into the 'big, bigger, largest' picture in order to keep transport costs and CO2 emissions per transported container as low as possible.

Times have changed since the 1990s. The transport of containers is under the magnifying glass, after several incidents where containers ended up in the sea. Also above the Dutch Wadden Islands. Perhaps the old Dutch innovation, which is still rock solid, will now be widely followed, says Niels van de Minkelis. KVNR.

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