| In South Africa, in the townships, it is common to reuse shipping containers for housing, stores, churches, etc. Like the U.S., South Africa imports more goods than the export - in the U.S. old shipping containers are often used as storage - others are shipped empty out of the west coast ports (in fact, one measure of the economy is the Los Angeles container index which measures what percentage of containers shipped out of the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach - generally it is well over 50% empty containers). |