Hundreds of thousands of empty shipping containers are filling marine terminals and truck yards across Southern California and tying up scarce trucking equipment as ocean carriers scramble to return empty boxes to factories in Asia
The biggest export out of Southern California these days is air. And it is suffocating the supply chain.
Shipping lines have made recovering the empty containers a priority because they want to get them back across the Pacific Ocean to take advantage of high freight rates for Asian exports. That has fractured a round trip for shipping containers that normally stretches across the U.S., with more customers now unpacking shipments at nearby warehouses already swamped with goods.
Some of those boxes might have been filled with goods. But because shippers don’t like to leave millions of dollars of merchandise in public, the majority were most likely empty. About 110,000 empties are stacked at port terminals on a typical day, officials say, and thousands more are piled in private yards and even scattered along streets. Before the current congestion, the ports had rarely tracked the number of empty containers sitting at docks.
To return a container Ms. Luna has to make an appointment on a different website for each of the port complex’s 13 terminals. Each terminal will only accept certain boxes for certain ocean carriers on certain days. The terminals are so full they often don’t take boxes at all or add requirements that truckers pick up an inbound box for each one they drop off.
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