Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (5 page)

S
o there it is: the three big disruptions that transformed the consumer goods industry and made one of the most popular gadgets—and most valuable companies—in history possible, bringing us to the morning of Friday the thirteenth and the sound of Big Ben bonging me awake.

There was the rise of digital technology. There was China's decision that, on the question of capitalism, it would rather switch than fight. And there was that most unsexy, nontechnological, big, and ugly metal can that spawned a transportation revolution. Of the three, it was the lowly shipping container—and its more spectacular progeny, the colossal container ship—that enabled the other two by turning massive amounts of transportation from a prohibitive cost into a transformative strategy. The container is both means and metaphor for this revolution, as the product it enabled—the signature product of the era, the smartphone—is the ultimate container itself, carrying inside it camera, calendar, navigator, reading library, music collection, transportation summoner—whatever we want it to be. The mundane iron shipping container spawned the supreme digital container, both of them innovations whose true impacts were unknown at the outset and are still evolving.

A defining quality of revolutionary change, however, is that its rewards last only until the next revolution comes along. RCA developed multiple revolutionary products to rule its analog roost for fifty years; now it's just an empty brand name licensed to makers of discount electronics. The current era of massive transportation footprints and distant outsourcing of nearly everything has also been in progress for fifty years, and once again forces are at work that could lead to profound change and less benefit for off-shoring. Call it . . . Cargogeddon.

The fleets of giant container ships that burn fuel not by the gallon but by the ton pose a growing environmental threat, with cargo vessels contributing about 3 percent of global carbon emissions now and on track to generate up to 14 percent of worldwide greenhouse gases by 2050.
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But beyond their smokestacks, the mega-ships that now dominate cargo movement are threatening the transportation system itself, overloading ports and the networks of rail, road, and trucking that connect them to the rest of the world. The U.S. is running out of capacity at these choke points, with neither the money nor the will to increase it. The rise of online shopping is exacerbating the goods-movement overload, because shipping one product at a time to homes requires many more trips than delivering the same amount of goods en masse to stores. In yet another door-to-door paradox, the phenomenon of next-day and same-day delivery, while personally efficient and seductively convenient for consumers, is grossly inefficient for the transportation system at large.

And yet the impact of embedding ever larger amounts of transportation in products is often minimized in public discussion, even by businesses that have embraced the business case for sustainability. Certainly they are concerned about fuel efficiency in distribution and shipping—that's just good business—but the transportation footprint of a manufactured product is often a secondary
concern at best. That's because the most common analysis of a consumer product's life-cycle—an estimate of its greenhouse gas footprint, which is a proxy for its energy costs—will usually find that the distribution of a product is a much smaller factor than its production. In its public disclosures on the footprint of its products, Apple states that transport accounts for only 4 percent of my iPhone 6 Plus's lifetime greenhouse gas emissions. Production of the device, meanwhile, accounts for 81 percent of its carbon footprint—twenty times the transportation footprint. Even my use of the phone—mostly by recharging it—overshadows shipping in Apple's life-cycle reckoning, producing 14 percent of its footprint.
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For a glass of milk, shipping produces only 3 percent of the footprint.
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For a bottle of California wine, it's about 13 percent.
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Transportation accounts for only 1 percent of the carbon footprint of a jacket from eco-conscious Patagonia, Inc., even though it's made of fabric from China and sewn in Vietnam. Production of its petroleum-based synthetic polyester is said to be the main culprit, accounting for 71 percent of the garment's carbon emissions.
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These product-by-product analyses are accurate but often incomplete—and in the end, they can distort the reality of the gargantuan impact of the door-to-door system as a whole. Viewed as a sector, the transportation of people and product is second only to generating electricity in terms of energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions (consuming 26 percent of the country's total energy and fuel supplies,
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while creating 31 percent of total greenhouse gases).
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Transportation has a larger energy and carbon footprint than all the other economic sectors: residential, commercial, and agricultural, as well as the industrial/product manufacturing sector that figures so prominently in those life-cycle analyses.

Transportation leads all sectors in one unfortunate metric: when it comes to
wasting
energy, the movement from door to door tops every other human endeavor, squandering 79 percent
of the energy and fuel it consumes.
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Finding ways to reduce that waste presents one of the great economic and environmental opportunities of the age.

Wondering if this problem is about the movement of people in cars rather than products on trucks and trains? The simple answer: it's both. Proportionately, goods movement has the more intense carbon footprint in the transportation space, with transport by rail, truck, ship, and pipeline together generating about a third of the total transportation footprint. Freight trucks alone spew 22.8 percent of all transportation carbon emissions. Passenger cars account for 42.7 percent, while pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs contribute 17 percent. Given that there are fewer than 3 million big-rig freight-hauling trucks in America out of 265 million vehicles total,
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the fossil-fuel-powered movement of goods has a disproportionately immense carbon, energy, and environmental footprint. Miles matter.

The attractions of offshoring are fading for other reasons, too. Conventional wisdom holds that cheap offshore labor is the main draw for American companies to shift operations abroad, but this grows less true each year. As a new middle class and consumer culture of its own emerges in China—one that wants to own iPhones as much as make them—wages have begun rising at a 20 percent annual clip (though admittedly from a low starting point, about $20 a day at suppliers such as Apple's Foxconn).
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More important, labor costs have become a minor consideration regardless of location in the making of modern consumer electronics such as the iPhone—a tiny fraction of the overall production cost. Chinese labor accounts for only 1.8 percent of the price of an iPhone, researchers at the University of California at Irvine have found. And the total labor costs worldwide, including in the U.S., account for only 5.3 percent of the iPhone's price—almost inconsequential compared to the 21.9 percent Apple pays for materials
to make the iPhone; and the largest piece of the pie, Apple profits, which were 58.5 percent when the study was done.

China, it turns out, makes little off the iPhone, while America—or, rather, an American company—makes a lot.

“Those who decry the decline of U.S. manufacturing too often point at the offshoring of assembly for electronics goods like the iPhone,” the Irvine researchers wrote. “Our analysis makes clear that there is simply little value in electronics assembly.”
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China keeps those jobs now because they have the very expensive facilities—and the engineering talent—to make products such as the iPhone in massive quantities. Silicon Valley is the world leader for designing these products and creating the software that makes them shine, but the Asian electronics powers have made themselves the nearly unassailable world leaders on actually building the stuff. As the previous CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, told President Obama in 2010, America does not have that capacity. “Those jobs are not coming back,” he said.
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But some of those jobs may disappear or be displaced in time as technology evolves—as the once-powerful RCA could attest, if the company still existed in any recognizable form. The advance of automation in factories, and the advent of 3-D printing as the next big thing in making consumer products, may usher in the next revolution and a new age of re-shoring. The future may belong once again to locally made or even made-at-home products: Buy the code for a pair of sunglasses or salad bowl online, the design is transmitted to a 3-D printer, and your purchase is created on the spot. Time will tell if the costs and capabilities of such technology will make it competitive. The only certainty is that the transportation piece of the puzzle is the one part that will never go away regardless of the tech. The direction of travel may change and miles may be shorn in the consumer goods space, but the transportation need will always be there, whether it is for finished products or the raw materials
to make them. Manufacturing jobs come and go, but the logistics field just keeps growing—32 percent growth even during the Great Recession, while all other fields grew by a collective average of 1 percent.
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Some say logistics
is
the new manufacturing.

Then there are those certain treasured products that will always have to be sourced from afar no matter what, and so always will pose a transportation challenge. One such good ranks among the most valuable and heavily traded commodities on the planet.

It's time to put down the phone and brew the morning coffee. But that's not the treasured commodity I touched next on this day in February, this Friday the thirteenth. That would be aluminum.

M
y home is full of ghosts. I grab one parked on my nightstand before I go downstairs to make the coffee: an empty can of lime-flavored seltzer, a bedtime thirst quencher now destined for the recycling bin.

This pop-top metal can, a miracle of design that weighs half as much as a first-class letter, is emblazoned with the label “refreshe,” all in lowercase letters. This is a ghost name for a ghost product. Every grocery, retail chain, and warehouse store has its ghost brands, their own private labels of products they sell but do not make. Washing machines, mouthwash, underwear, batteries, and every flavor of soda known to man—there are ghost versions of them all, their prices lower than the “name brands,” their labels vague or silent on their true origins and journeys. It's all part of the vast puzzle of the modern consumer economy, in which we eat, guzzle, buy, and use things with no idea who makes them, where they come from, or what great dance of men and materials transports them to us.

But there are clues hidden in plain sight. My soda can is embedded with a coded road map that, properly read, lifts the sheet off the ghost of this ubiquitous, familiar object.

Most consumers don't notice or look for it, but each of the
billions of beverage cans made in America bears a small logo or company name unobtrusively tucked below the bar code or near the bottom rim. It may be an image of a crown or a company name apparently unrelated to the beverage inside: Ball and Rexam are the two most common ones, companies that began the merger process in 2015. These mark the maker of the can, not its contents. On the can's domed bottom—a shape not at all arbitrary but part of an intelligent design—is the familiar inked product “use by” date and code, the black machine print starkly obvious yet barely legible against the pale silver of the unadorned metal.

An even closer look yields information most never notice: two numbers a half inch tall embossed faintly into the can bottom rather than inked. These numbers, sometimes reversed as if in mirror image, are part of the quality control tracking process used by manufacturers of the cans. They identify the factory line and specific machine that turned a sheet of metal into a can. Before shipping, every can gets a fast but thorough inspection by computerized video in the time it takes a human to blink; the numbers let defects be pinpointed to an errant machine, metal die, alignment, or setting. It's no accident that every can is the same—these codes and inspections weed out the outliers.

Such clues also uncover the path a beverage takes from creation to expiration, one that explains much about the transportation embedded in all our products, lives, and choices, and how this particular container can be both very green and very dirty at the same time, ingenious yet also mad. The trail of numbers, logos, and names on my particular can of refreshe reveals a tangled path that begins in Australia but also includes most of the countries of Europe and the majority of states in America. Then it crosses oceans, ports, and freight yards to an aluminum mill in Tennessee, after which the material that will become my can
of lime-flavored seltzer finally arrives at a rail spur in Northern California behind a beverage can manufacturing plant. From there it will travel by truck to a bottling plant and then a grocery distribution center for shipment to my local supermarket. That entire journey took as little as 60 days and spanned fewer than 10,000 miles for some of the material in that seltzer and its package. Other portions took as many as 60 years and several million miles before reaching my nightstand, an odd quirk of the door-to-door economy and the unique material that goes into that can.

Long or short, such a journey always starts with a reddish clod of rock and dirt called bauxite, inconveniently located in tropical regions of the world far from those who want it most. From that red dirt comes that most versatile of metals, aluminum, and a journey that touches every home and car and truck and plane—and soda can—in America, and the world.

L
ittle cans are big business. America produces 94 billion of the beverage variety in a year, about a fifth of the world total. That's 2,981 aluminum cans pressed, cut, molded, and stretched into shape every second, which amounts to 293 cans a year of beer, soda, juice, and energy drinks for every man, woman, and child in the country.
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Aluminum is used in tens of thousands of products, from jetliner skins to automotive engine blocks, from glass and ceramics to thousands of miles of high-voltage power lines, from the liners of potato chip bags and juice pouches to the cladding inside nuclear reactors. From exquisite creations such as artificial sapphires to the mundane wrapping that keeps your leftover meat loaf fresh, aluminum has worked its way into daily life and the constant movement of ourselves and our stuff. This upstart metal went from zero to everywhere, from little known to essential in
the space of little more than a century, while iron and steel needed a head start that predates Christianity by thousands of years to reach a comparably exalted position in our modern world. And no single product commands as much of the world supply of aluminum as the single-use, disposable beverage can.

One of every five pounds of aluminum processed in the world each year becomes a can for our beer, soda, and other refreshments. The lowly, ingenious can we barely give a single thought is also the single largest piece of a $90 billion global aluminum industry.
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That means my seltzer can and all its little sisters are worth $18 billion a year before a drop of brew or bubbly water even touches it. Just on the basis of labor, energy, and material costs, my can of seltzer is worth far more than the beverage it holds.

On its face, this can may seem little more than a simple, convenient storage device, but storage is not the driver of this familiar object's design and worth, any more than a giant shipping container is designed for storage. The can's primary purpose is to enable the
transportation
of massive amounts of single-serve beverages more efficiently and cheaply than any other container type.
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Its virtues include being lighter and stronger than reusable glass. When boxed, it wastes less space than tapered and necked single-use plastic bottles. And it is far more stackable than either of these rival materials when placed on pallets and loaded on ships and trucks, saving space, trips, fuel, and money. Think of the can as a miniature shipping container itself, designed to be placed easily in much larger containers and sent on its way. The fact that it stacks nicely in a home cupboard, refrigerator, or picnic cooler is merely a happy by-product of its shippability.

The aluminum beverage container, then, is as much a transportation game changer as those giant shipping containers that longshoremen also call cans, although the beverage variety is
prized for more than its shippable design and weight. Beverage cans are prized most of all for the unique quality of the metal used to make them: its immortality. Alone among all manufactured substances, aluminum is infinitely recyclable. And, just as rare, it is highly profitable to do so.

This is how aluminum merchants can position their metal as the new transportation “killer app”: a superlight, superstrong substance that never wears out at the molecular level but can be re-formed at will and sourced domestically over and over, thereby cutting production and transportation costs by a factor of ten. New supplies of the metal—what industry insiders call “primary” aluminum—are dirty and energy-intensive to obtain, after which the substance must be transported across vast distances to reach the majority of consumers. But once shipped, “secondary” aluminum can be continually reincarnated as a new product with many of the costs and distances stripped away. More than a century of mining has produced nearly a billion tons of the stuff, and an estimated three quarters of that remains in circulation and theoretically available for recycling from old cars, aircraft, appliances, obsolete TV antennas, and, of course, cans, which are recycled at far higher rates than any other single-use container.
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No wonder the beverage can has become the global poster child for recycling, the one “single-use” product that gets recycled more than it's landfilled.
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The other big recyclables—paper and plastic—degrade during the recycling process, or lose value, or end up costing more than new material, so market forces for repurposing these waste products are mixed at best. Recycled aluminum, however, is a different story: not only is it chemically and physically indistinguishable from the new stuff, but it is beyond cost competitive. Aluminum recycling uses 92 percent less energy than mining and refining aluminum from bauxite,
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and is often done near the end consumer rather than in far-off pit mines, lowering
transportation costs and distance. Recycled aluminum is so valuable that its salvage earnings often underwrite municipal programs that recycle other more marginal plastic, glass, and paper waste.
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This explains why so much of the aluminum extracted from the earth since the 1880s is still in play, some of it recycled dozens or even hundreds of times. Some fraction of the aluminum in your car, your fridge, or your can of cola could have been mined more than a century ago. In previous incarnations it might have flown bombing raids in World War II, or made ice cubes in some 1960s refrigerator, or emerged from the thousands of tons of aluminum skyscraper sheathing salvaged from the destruction of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Or the can in your hand may have been someone else's can of soda as little as two months ago, because that's the current turnaround from fridge to recycling bin to factory to store shelf.

Kevin McKnight looks at such a can—or a new, lightweight wheel hub, or an experimental aluminum-based car battery that theoretically could boost an electric car to a 1,000-mile range—and sees the future. An aluminum-coated future, to be sure, which is to be expected, as McKnight works for the world's first and largest aluminum company, Alcoa. “We've reached an inflection point,” the dapper Pittsburgh-based executive declared at an annual conference of environmentally conscious corporate leaders called Brainstorm Green. “The economics of aluminum are transforming whole industries, and transportation is our sweet spot.”

McKnight's official title at Alcoa is chief sustainability officer, which puts him in charge of the company's efforts to become cleaner and greener—and, in the process, grow that transportation sweet spot into a mobility revolution. In practice his job might better be described as chief evangelist for an aluminum-
rich future, and he is wildly enthusiastic about the possibilities as he travels the company's supply chain from Australia to Jamaica to Brazil and Canada, where he talks up the benefits of the industry his company invented at gatherings like Brainstorm.

Long the material of choice for aircraft and space vehicles because of its light weight and the fact that it does not rust like iron and steel, aluminum is now being touted as the next big thing for reinventing ground transportation. Aluminum is so light (atom by atom it weighs less than many gases) that swapping it with steel in cars and trucks could cut the average vehicle's weight in half, with corresponding decreases in fuel consumption and carbon emissions. In truth, such gains have been achievable since World War II. But McKnight's new pitch to carmakers—who have invested billions in steel bending and welding machines that they have been loath to replace—suddenly sounds much more enticing these days. The looming U.S. legal mandate that new cars more than double their average fuel efficiency by 2025 has seen to that.
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Turning cars into giant aluminum cans could go a long way to satisfying that goal, and McKnight and Alcoa, along with their competitors, have been pushing out new products to facilitate this “light-weighting” of vehicles to make them greener without necessarily abandoning the internal combustion engines that American carmakers (and American consumers) know and love best. Ford has now converted the body of its F–150 pickup truck—for three decades the most popular vehicle in America—from steel to an Alcoa-made military-grade aluminum alloy. This is just the visible thin skin of the truck body as opposed to the load-bearing structures beneath, but the partial changeover from steel still cut the truck's weight by 700 pounds. Given the 700,000 annual sales of the F–150, that's like taking 120,000 of the trucks off the road.

Vehicles are the single most recycled consumer product in the world,
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so the increasing amounts of aluminum going into
cars and trucks will eventually be recycled, providing the same 92 percent energy cost savings that beverage cans offer. But it takes nearly twelve years on average for passenger vehicles to enter the big recycling bin known as the scrapyard (and two or three times that for planes, trains, and cargo ships), with about 11.5 million vehicles scrapped annually in the U.S. Therein lies one of the great contradictions in the aluminum story and McKnight's sweet-spot pitch. Demand for aluminum in the transportation space has exploded—the record 504 million pounds of the metal delivered to automakers in 2014 is projected to rise to 2.68 billion pounds by 2018
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—but recycling alone cannot yield the required supplies quickly enough. So ever more primary aluminum has to be mined and refined to meet the demand for more efficient cars.

This is how aluminum can be at once green and dirty, both a shining example of the “cradle-to-cradle” reuse economy and a coal-soaked, industrial-age relic of primitive extraction, spewing waste and toxins in its wake. This is where my can of seltzer's journey begins, straddling two worlds.

T
he world's largest bauxite mine is operated by Alcoa at Huntly in Western Australia, producing more than 20 million tons of the reddish brown ore each year. Towering excavators and loaders with wheels twice the height of their drivers, capable of hauling 190 tons of ore in a single load, crawl out of the pit in a constant stream. These dump trucks on steroids deliver the bauxite to the grinding roar of the rock crushers, which must be sprayed constantly with water to suppress the choking clouds of red dust spewing from their jaws. Boulders of ore torn fresh from the ground are pummeled into three-inch pebbles, each of which has 20 to 30 percent aluminum chemically locked within. The pebbles are loaded onto massive conveyor belts that snake down
through forestland more than fourteen miles, delivering 5,400 tons every hour to Alcoa's sprawling Pinjarra refinery.