BBC Launches Shipping Container on Global Odyssey

It’s a fascinating project that the news organization is calling “The Box.” Explains the BBC’s business editor: “We have painted and branded a BBC container and bolted on a GPS transmitter so you can follow its progress all year round as it criss-crosses the globe. The Box will hopefully reach the US, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa and when it does BBC correspondents will be there to report on who’s producing goods and who’s consuming them.” Readers can follow its progress on a map. It’s now in Southampton, apparently waiting to be shipped out.

The BBC project is named after the 2006 book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson.

It sounds like a good read. From the publisher’s promotional material:

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container’s creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

I love these projects that try to tell the story of globalization through the prism of a single object or a few objects, be it some simple clothing items  or a humble french fry.

The Box should be fun to follow, assuming all goes according to plan.

Notes the BBC: “We are keeping our fingers crossed the Box does not fall overboard (it happens)...”

I guess if it does happen there’s a story to be told about the creation of the first media-branded artificial reef, no?

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