File this story under things that I just find kind of interesting. I didn’t realize we lost an average of 10,000 shipping containers at sea every year:
Right now, as you read this, there are five or six million shipping containers on enormous cargo ships sailing across the world’s oceans. And about every hour, on average, one is falling overboard never to be seen again. It’s estimated that 10,000 of these large containers are lost at sea each year, and our understanding of what happens to them afterwards is scant at best.
That’s a lot of lost revenue and material. The story itself is an interesting read as it goes over the environmental impact these containers have. Personally I just found the sheer number of lost containers to be much higher than anything I would have expected.