Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Top Story

Green container floors: Maersk to shift to bamboo (incl. video link)

You may, or may not, know that many shipping containers have traditionally been fitted with hardwood floors typically harvested from endangered rainforests, and now Denmark’s Maersk Line plans on replacing that flooring with bamboo as part of its overall green-shipping initiative.

“We’re doing this so that all the floors we use in our containers are sustainable…this is the next step,” said Jacob Sterling, head of climate and environment at A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, in a Bloomberg Television interview. Sterling said the cost comparison between bamboo and the industry standard hardwood container flooring is essentially a wash, with the type of product and where it is sourced from being the key issue in terms of sustainability.

“It comes from plantations in China instead of tropical rainforests,” Sterling said.

Maersk is looking at other flooring types as well, including recycled plastic, Sterling said.

Maersk does not plan on replacing existing container flooring, but will use the next-generation flooring types in new boxes and will take 18 years to fully deploy – the lifetime of a typical container, Sterling said.

For the link to the video of the Bloomberg interview: www.washingtonpost.com

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