By 2015, behemoths holding 10,000 40-foot containers had joined the world’s merchant fleet, and ships that had been state-of-the-art two decades earlier were being sold for scrap. By some estimates, the giant vessels cut 30 percent or more off the cost of moving a container from Asia to Europe: a ship laden with 10,000 full-size containers burns perhaps half as much fuel per box as one carrying 3,000 containers, and the size of the crew need be no larger.
