Look, ma! No doors!
Imagine a butter dish ' one of those oblong ones that you can put a whole stick of butter in and cover with a glass top. O.K., now imagine one that is 40 feet long, made of steel, with latches around the perimeter where the bottom and top meet and standard container lifting hardware like corner castings instead of a little glass knob to pull the top off.
That will give you a pretty good idea of the design for a shipping container being promoted by the company Cakeboxx at this week's Intermodal show in Hamburg.
Doors? There are no doors. To gain access to the contents of the container, the latches would be opened and straddle carrier, top-loader, or even a high-reach forklift would be used to remove the entire top.
The idea behind the container is create a more secure container, yet one that is easy for customs or security officials to gain access to if they need to do an examination, said Gary Whyte, president of Aurora, Ore.-based Cakeboxx.
With the top removed, he said the container would be as easy to unload and load as a flatbed truck.
Without doors and the need for common, yet quite conspicuous equipment to gain access, the container would be less vulnerable to theft, vandalism and smuggling, Whyte said.
'We see it as a general purpose container, not something for specialized cargo,' he said of his invention. 'We would have a narrow introduction, but we expect we would grow out of it quite quickly.'
To do that, he said, the box's cost would have to be within 5 percent to 10 percent of a standard containers.
Still in the prototype development stage, Whyte's company plans to begin testing the containers, probably on a transatlantic route this spring.
Whyte said he was motivated to come up with a new container design after speaking with clients about the need to increase security. He also has another company, Source Code Tags, which helps companies uncover counterfeiters of high-tech products or pharmaceuticals.