This company believes it can bring emissions-free shipping to reality.
Enter SailCargo INC., an ambitious company whose goal is to make emission-free shipping a reality by building up a fleet of eco-friendly vessels that address the most egregious environmental offenses plaguing the industry.
We hope that this will open the doors for any company, whether it's MSC or Maersk, to at least say, ‘Hey, they have a market and they're making money.’ We want to show them that it's worth thinking about, and hHow do you respond to critics who would say it’s impossible to replace massive steel ships with eco-friendly wooden boats that can’t match those vessels’ carrying capacity?
You can say what would sound like two contradictory statements about the modern shipping industry right now. One is that it's the most efficient way of transporting goods. If you were to put these goods on a truck or a plane, you would have significantly higher emissions per ton. There's nothing we can do about it because there's no international police. You have nations’ coastguards, but they don't extend past that 12-mile jurisdiction. Unfortunately, these companies don't have any incentive to switch to a cleaner fuel, because the client at the end pays for it. If you shop for something, you're [the one] paying the price of fuel at that time.
A lot of the people [working these ships] are from Pakistan, Malaysia — they're working on what are literally called ‘slave contracts.’ That's how they are kept as crew. It's a really brutal cycle of [labor] entrapment. I was looking at the numbers and I saw that there was a lot of financial struggle [to do this kind of clean shipping]. And I just thought, ‘I don't think it has to be this way, I think we can make it financially viable.’ We identified that we wanted to be in a warmer country that would be close to the wood source. It was Lynx Guimond, my co-founder, who was living in Costa Rica at the time, who told me to come to check it out. So, I went for a two-week reconnaissance mission and never left.
What about the ship itself — Ceiba — what kinds of technology will be incorporated into its construction?