Dutch company 4Fold believes the time is right to save scarce space on container ships by using foldable containers.
The firm is working with shipping lines to trial a design that sees boxes collapse so that four can be stacked in the space that one is taking up now.
About 27% of the 862m 20-foot containers passing through the world's ports will be empty this year, according to shipping consultancy Drewry.
The cost to the shipping industry of transporting them to load ports is about $20bn per year, Boston Consulting Group has calculated.
These empty boxes can hang around for days or weeks, taking up vital space in a congested supply chain.
"We can solve part of this imbalance, or at least the inefficiency of transporting air," 4Fold chief executive Hans Broekhuis told Bloomberg.
The company's 40-foot foldable boxes gained certification from the Container Safety Convention and International Organization for Standardization back in 2013.
Now more than 15 lines and cargo owners covering 60 ports worldwide are testing Delft-based 4Fold's system, the company claims. Producers like Procter & Gamble are also testing the technology.
A shipping dream?
Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of giant container ship owner AP Moller-Maersk, has called foldable containers the "dream of the shipping industry".
But higher initial costs and a reluctance to turn to a new business model have kept the accordion-like boxes from becoming mainstream so far.
4Fold says hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions are wasted shipping empty boxes.
"This form of global inefficiency has to stop. Right now," the company has said.
4Fold claims its containers can save up to 37% in costs and CO2.
This year, the company selected China's Dong Fang International Container Group to produce the equipment.
Orders are being closed for larger quantities of the boxes, 4Fold has said.
"With Dong Fang, HCI secured production capacity for large volumes of 4Fold containers to meet the growing demand of shipping lines and shippers," Broekhuis said in a press statement.
"Dong Fang, one of the market leaders in special container production, is ultimately equipped to build the 4Fold and is able to scale up to the quantities that we need to serve our customers."
