Shipbuilders harness the wind to clean up global shipping

Find out more about our Reverse Course series here.

If you need to move a dishwasher or a new TV from a factory in Asia to a store in California, a container ship is the cheapest way to do it.

These vessels are as long as several football fields and can carry tens of thousands of individual 20-foot containers. According to the United Nations, more than 11 billion tons of stuff was shipped by sea in 2021.

Container ships use heavy fuel oil called bunker fuel. They’re more efficient than trains, trucks and planes. But bunker fuel is highly polluting, and container ships produce about 3% of the world’s emissions.

Shipping by sea wasn’t always this way. There was a time when boats used the power of the wind to ferry goods across the globe.

And today, as the world looks for ways to cut back on planet-warming emissions, some shipbuilders are traveling back in time to find