Why Do Shipping Containers Travel Empty?

Somewhere on the ocean right now, a container ship is burning fuel to carry thousands of steel boxes with nothing inside them. Not a few boxes, and not occasionally. According to Sea-Intelligence analysis of Container Trade Statistics data, roughly one in every three containers moved globally is empty, up from about one in four before the pandemic. Measured in teu-miles, the unit that actually reflects the work a ship does, empty repositioning now accounts for around 30 percent of all container shipping activity.

This looks like a straightforward inefficiency, the kind of thing a better algorithm ought to fix. It is not. Empty repositioning is the rational response to a problem that sits outside logistics entirely, and the numbers show it getting worse rather than better. Understanding why requires separating the part that is a coordination failure from the part that is simply the shape of world trade made visible in steel.

 

Global Trade Rarely Flows Equally

 

The root cause is not complicated. Some regions make far more physical goods than they consume, and others consume far more than they make. Containers follow the goods, so containers accumulate where consumption exceeds production and run short where production exceeds consumption.

Drewry's analysis puts the structural position bluntly: Asia has been the only net container-exporting region since 2010. North America and Africa each import roughly two and a half times as many loaded containers as they export, which leads Drewry to the memorable observation that empty containers are effectively their largest export trade. In 2021, an estimated 40 million teu moved from importing regions back to exporting regions carrying nothing.

The imbalance is a goods imbalance, not a shipping one, and that distinction is the key to the whole subject. A European exporter cannot fill a Rotterdam to Shanghai container with European manufactured goods that do not exist in containerisable volume. Europe's exports to Asia are weighted toward services, high-value low-volume items, and bulk commodities that do not travel in boxes. No amount of software improves that. It is also why the frequently predicted solution of manufacturing diversification has not helped yet: China's share of US container imports from Asia fell from 69 percent in 2017 to around 59 percent by 2023, but as Drewry notes, the volume was largely substituted by other Asian countries or rerouted through Canada and Mexico. The boxes still go the same direction.

 

Empty Containers Still Cost Money

 

An empty box occupies the same slot on a ship as a full one, requires the same crane lift at each end, the same yard space, the same chassis and the same truck move. The only thing it does not do is generate revenue.

Drewry estimates that empty movements on the major east-west trades alone cost at least 16 billion dollars a year in empty miles. That cost does not disappear; it is recovered from the cargo that does pay, which means the head-haul shipper and ultimately the consumer in the importing country funds the return journey of the box their goods arrived in. The industry does this explicitly as well as implicitly, through equipment imbalance surcharges levied separately from base freight rates.

The environmental arithmetic follows the same logic and is rarely stated this cleanly. Because a growing share of ship capacity is devoted to moving air, the emissions attributable to each loaded teu-mile have risen even as ships themselves have become more efficient. Sea-Intelligence calculates that the carbon footprint of a loaded teu-mile is about 8 percent higher than in 2019 purely because of worsening imbalance. Every tonne of cargo now carries a heavier emissions burden than it did seven years ago, and not one gram of that increase comes from the cargo.

 

Why Not Fill Every Container?

 

The carousel's fourth slide asks the obvious question, and the answer is more interesting than scheduling difficulty.

Start with the fact that a container is not a generic box. It is a 20-foot or a 40-foot or a 40-foot high cube, and it may be a reefer, an open top, a flat rack or a tank container. It belongs to a specific carrier or a specific leasing company, under terms that govern where it may be dropped off and by when. A shipper needing a 20-foot box in Ningbo is not helped by the availability of a 40-foot high cube in Hamburg, and the current Gulf disruption has produced exactly that mismatch at scale, with China receiving three of every four arriving containers empty while its exporters still report shortages of 20-foot units, open tops and flat racks.

Then add time. Every day a container sits idle it accrues cost, through per diem charges, storage, and the opportunity cost of an asset that earns only while moving. A carrier weighing whether to hold a box in Los Angeles for three weeks waiting for a westbound load, or ship it empty to Asia immediately, is comparing two costs, not choosing between efficiency and waste. When the asset is worth a few thousand dollars and the daily holding cost is meaningful, shipping it empty frequently wins.

The current Gulf crisis has produced the extreme version of this calculation. With European yards congested and repositioning costs elevated, reporting from the trade press describes a situation where moving the empties costs more than the boxes themselves are worth, leaving leasing companies with no commercial reason to move them at all. Southampton has reported dry container yard utilisation at 97 percent, Rotterdam terminals between 85 and 95 percent, and Antwerp's PSA Q913 at 90 percent. The boxes are not stuck because nobody noticed. They are stuck because the economics of retrieving them do not work.

This is the honest answer to the slide's question. Moving an empty container is not a failure to find cargo. It is usually the cheaper of two unattractive options, and the people making the decision are not confused about it.

 

The Problem Is Getting Worse

 

What should concern anyone following this is the trend, which runs firmly in the wrong direction.

Against a pre-pandemic baseline, empties have risen from about 22 percent of loaded teu to 28 percent by January 2026, and from 32 percent to 42 percent of loaded teu-miles. Compared with the first quarter of 2019, empty container volume is up 65 percent while full container shipments are up 17 percent, meaning carriers now move roughly twice the distance-weighted volume of empty boxes they did before the pandemic. On a twelve-month rolling basis, empties requiring repositioning have risen by half over seven years, from three million teu to four and a half million teu per month. Sea-Intelligence's summary is that for every ten full containers moved globally, more than four empties need repatriating.

One deserved correction to a common assumption: this is not primarily a Red Sea story. Sea-Intelligence modelled what the figures would look like under normal Suez routing and found no real distortion attributable to the diversions, concluding that the imbalance is structural rather than routing-driven. The Asia to Europe lane has reached a loaded import to export ratio of 3.3 to 1, described at TPM26 as the widest on that trade in recent history, and that gap reflects what is in the boxes rather than which way they sailed.

 

When the Network Jams

 

The 2026 Strait of Hormuz disruption has provided an unwelcome demonstration of what happens when a repositioning cycle that was already stretched gets broken, and it is worth recording because it shows how the failure propagates.

Empties accumulated in Europe while Asian export hubs ran short, with diverted equipment stranded at workaround ports that had no return cargo to offer. In India, JNPT volumes reportedly rose more than 700 percent against February baselines, with import dwell times reaching over 23 days. Singapore yards ran at 85 to 95 percent and Port Klang's Westport recorded import dwell above ten days. Carriers responded with capacity management rather than dedicated repositioning programmes: 47 blank sailings across major lanes in March and April, slow steaming reduced to 16 or 17 knots from 19 or 20, and 28 cancelled Asia to Europe voyages removing roughly 15 percent of weekly nominal capacity on that lane. Maersk applied drop-off charges in Gulf ports ranging from 600 dollars per teu at Abu Dhabi to 3,000 dollars at Bahrain, which is a price signal designed to stop empties entering a region they cannot leave.

Hapag-Lloyd's assessment, that even after a reopening the retrieval of stranded Gulf equipment would take weeks if not months, captures the asymmetry at the heart of the system. Equipment distributes itself through the network quickly when trade flows normally and recovers very slowly when it does not, because there is no mechanism for moving boxes against the commercial grain at speed.

 

What Actually Reduces Empty Moves

 

The carousel's closing slide names three levers, and they are the right ones, though they differ enormously in how much they can achieve.

Better container tracking is genuinely useful and now widely deployed. Knowing where every box is, in near real time, is the precondition for everything else. It does not by itself reduce empty moves; it reduces the number of empty moves made because nobody knew a closer box existed.

Smarter equipment sharing is where the largest realistic gains sit. The two techniques that matter are the street turn, where an import container is delivered, unloaded and reloaded by a nearby exporter without ever returning to the terminal, and triangulation, where carriers and leasing companies match each other's surpluses and deficits rather than each repositioning their own fleet. Both are old ideas held back by commercial rather than technical obstacles: carriers are reluctant to share equipment with competitors, interchange agreements are administratively heavy, and liability for damage discovered later is contested. Digital matching platforms have made progress here, and this is the part of the problem that is genuinely a coordination failure and therefore genuinely fixable.

More efficient repositioning means better forecasting and optimisation of the empty flows that remain unavoidable, which saves real money at the margin without changing the underlying volume.

It is worth noting what is absent from that list. Collapsible containers, which would let four folded boxes occupy the slot of one, have been engineered repeatedly over three decades and have never scaled, because folding and unfolding consumes labour and time at precisely the congested terminals where both are scarce, and because a container that is not fully interchangeable with every other container loses most of its value. The idea reappears every few years and remains a good illustration of how a technically sound solution can be commercially hopeless.

 

An Empty Box Reveals a Bigger Problem

 

The honest conclusion is that the industry can address perhaps a third of this problem and not the rest. Street turns, equipment pooling and better visibility can meaningfully reduce the number of empty moves, cut congestion at the nodes where boxes pile up, and lower cost and emissions at the margin. None of it touches the fact that Asia exports far more manufactured goods than it imports, and that the boxes must come back.

Drewry's assessment is that substantial improvement would require a real shift toward near-sourcing and more balanced intercontinental trade, and that until then empty container handling will keep rising. The data supports that reading. The empty container is not a logistics problem that happens to reflect trade patterns. It is the trade pattern, rendered in corrugated steel, loaded onto a ship and sent back where it came from.

 

Note: This article reflects the state of the sector as of October 2026, drawing on sources including Sea-Intelligence analysis of Container Trade Statistics data, Drewry research on container repositioning and trade imbalance, and trade press reporting on the 2026 Gulf disruption and its effects on equipment availability. Figures relating to the ongoing Gulf situation are as reported by the named sources and continue to change.