from: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0504containers04.html

Cargo containers pile up near ports
A byproduct of U.S. trade deficit

Steve Strunsky
Associated Press
May. 4, 2003 12:00 AM

NEWARK, N.J. - They stand like empty Everests of trade, mountains of shipping containers stacked seven or eight high, over hundreds of acres of industrial land around the East Coast's busiest port.

The shipping container surplus around Port Newark and the adjacent Port Authority Marine Terminal at Elizabeth, N.J., is a byproduct of the U.S. trade deficit.

Because of the deficit, the port takes in and unloads more containers than it can fill up and ship out. Since it's cheaper for freight companies to buy new containers overseas than to ship empties back from the United States to be reloaded, the result is stockpiling that literally has altered the local landscape.

To the aesthetically imaginative, the boxy foothills of blue, yellow and ocher containers may look good. For Carlos Rodriguez, an auto mechanic at a salvage yard near a container lot on Doremus Avenue, the stacks look better than the trash heaps some of them replaced.

"It looks cleaner," said Rodriguez, 29. "They used to dump a lot of garbage there."

To others, the mounting containers from Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are eyesores that are blotting out the skylines of Newark and Manhattan.

"You don't want to get up in the morning and look over toward the river and see those containers," Newark City Councilman Augusto Amador said.

Despite short-term economic advantages of stockpiling, planners say the containers could have negative long-term effects on the environment, traffic, employment, even the viability of the port itself by discouraging the cleanup and development of contaminated lots where the containers are stacked.

"These properties can have a much higher utility, a much higher use, because they're prime distribution locations," said John Hummer, director of freight initiatives at the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, which approves federal funding of transportation projects. "And instead, the properties are being used for this, which we don't feel is appropriate."

Amador worked with one storage company, Palmer Industries, to move 1,000 or more containers stacked along the Passaic River. He said the city is looking into limiting the height of container stacks, as long as jobs at the port aren't affected.

A study by the planning authority with the New Jersey Institute of Technology reported that development of warehouse and distribution centers at the port, rather than along suburban or rural highways an hour or more away, would reduce highway truck traffic and clean up the contaminated former industrial sites, known as brownfields.

Such development also would create jobs "for an urban workforce that desperately needs it," said Jim Mack, a brownfields specialist at the institute.

As an example of how stockpiling can conflict with development, the study said that the owner of a 13-acre site where a developer had offered to build a 330,000-square-foot distribution center received a competing offer by a container storage company.

The storage company's proposal, for a 10-year lease at $3,000 per month per acre, was doubly attractive in that it allowed the property owner to avoid the costly cleanup a warehouse proposal would entail. The companies were not identified.

Another brownfield site leased for container storage, a 37-acre lot that was once a tar refining plant, is owned by the chemical giant DuPont.

Rick Straitman, spokesman for DuPont Corporate Remediation Group, said that "we would like to see the site developed," and that the company is working with the state Department of Environmental Protection on a cleanup plan.

In the meantime, he said, DuPont leased the site because, "as you know, a piece of vacant land attracts dumping."

Indicative of the nation's trade deficit, the Newark-Elizabeth complex unloaded 1.6 million full containers in the first 11 months of 2002 but shipped out only 688,000, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Coleman said the agency, which runs the ports, does not track the number of empties around the port, although estimates run to 150,000.

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