The biggest export out of Southern California these days is air. And it is suffocating the supply chain.
Hundreds of thousands of empty containers are filling marine terminals and truck yards across the region and tying up scarce trucking equipment as ocean carriers scramble to return empty boxes to factories in Asia. The gridlock on the export side of U.S. supply chains is the mirror of the congestion tying up imports, and officials say it is complicating efforts to unwind the bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Shipping lines have made recovering the empty containers a priority because they want to get them back across the Pacific Ocean to take advantage of high freight rates for Asian exports. That has fractured a round trip for shipping containers that normally stretches across the U.S., with more customers now unpacking shipments at nearby warehouses already swamped with goods.
With ships already full, there isn’t enough space for empty boxes that are then piled onto increasingly high stacks to await transport and loading onto outbound vessels.
Hundreds of private parcels of land have been opened up for empty containers, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, told harbor commissioners at a recent meeting. Mr. Seroka said that during a recent helicopter tour from the port complex to San Bernardino, 80 miles away, he saw “containers strewn throughout the region.”
Some of those boxes might have been filled with goods. But because shippers don’t like to leave millions of dollars of merchandise in public, the majority were most likely empty.
The boxes are the result of an import surge that swamped the domestic supply chain this year as consumers switched spending from services to goods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Loaded imports at the California ports complex totaled the equivalent of 6.9 million containers between January and August, an increase of 23% compared with the same period in 2019, according to research and consulting firm Beacon Economics.
The ports handled the equivalent of 6 million empty export containers during the first 10 months of this year, 20% more empty boxes than in all of 2019, according to data from the ports.
About 110,000 empties are stacked at port terminals on a typical day, officials say, and thousands more are piled in private yards and even scattered along streets. Before the current congestion, the ports had rarely tracked the number of empty containers sitting at docks.
Hundreds of thousands of boxes are lifted from ships each month, delivered to warehouses and their contents emptied. Truckers say that when they try to return the boxes they find terminals so full that it is almost impossible to secure an appointment to return them. “It is like playing the lottery,” said Leslie Luna, freight coordinator for Luna and Son’s Trucking LLC, a small, short-haul trucking firm in Commerce, Calif.
Ms. Luna said she sometimes stays up until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. refreshing appointment-booking websites to return containers that fill her company’s 2-acre yard.
To return a container Ms. Luna has to make an appointment on a different website for each of the port complex’s 13 terminals. Each terminal will only accept certain boxes for certain ocean carriers on certain days. The terminals are so full they often don’t take boxes at all or add requirements that truckers pick up an inbound box for each one they drop off.