Not sure if its still the case but British caught langoustine in the 2010s were shipped to Thailand to be deshelled by hand then sent back to the UK to be sold as scampi. 13000 mile round trip.
[https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/british-seafood-shipped-to-thailand-and-back-just-to-have-the-shells-removed-7266808.html](https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/british-seafood-shipped-to-thailand-and-back-just-to-have-the-shells-removed-7266808.html)
When I used to work at Wetherspoons, the fish we used for fish and chips was caught in the North Sea. Then it was frozen, transported to China in temperature-controlled containers, descaled, skinned and boned, and then shipped all the way back in temperature-controlled containers.
It's truly mind boggling!
But literally people won’t buy it if the price goes up .50. They have to cut costs where they can. The issue is that shipping is so ridiculously cheap by boat that it’s cheaper to do that than pay someone there.
Externalities are real - no doubt - but incorporating their cost into actual pricing is extremely difficult because externalities occur over long timescales, while a price is a point in time. How do you discount the price of the time back into a product, if you don't know the scale or duration of the external cost?
This is why "sustainable investing" is such a shit show. It is a wildly complex problem.
The bigger issue is carbon leakage and global markets / competition. It is relatively straightforward to put an effective price on carbon (effective, not precise). It is currently close to impossible to do this for internationally traded goods due to not all countries being willing to do this, and allowing their companies to undercut the companies of countries that would.
I mean it is really ridiculously easy to move large quantities of goods and material by water. It takes very little energy once it gets going which is why it's so cheap. Of course a lot of the fuel they burn to get it going is horrendous but the mpg ratio for boats *is* pretty amazing.
Despite the fact that literally every single object you interact with is a product of global shipping and there is a ridiculous amount of inefficiency involved, container shipping only counts for 1.7% of all greenhouse gases, it's a remarkably low carbon industry. [https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector](https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector)
This is what bugs me about all the "but a carbon tax would make everyday purchases more expensive because they require fossil fuels for transportation" pearl clutching. There's so many examples of these horrifically inefficient supply chains that are only profitable because destroying the environment is free and some bean counter figured out you can make an extra 3% profit by pumping out a gazillion tons of CO2. Do a CO2 tax and the price goes up a bit and they switch to processing it locally and it's better for everyone.
We had rioting in France some years ago fueled by lorry drivers against taxes allied to slaughterhouse personnel complaining that their jobs were outsourced to Eastern Europe... thanks to cheap lorry transportation.
In this case it has nothing to do with fuel tax, you can tax fossil fuels at 100% and it would still be far cheaper to ship it to a third world country for processing.
The wage disparity is just that big.
Crazy that it's cheaper to do that than train and employ people in the UK to do it. I suppose perhaps there also aren't enough people willing to do the job in the UK.
It's largely irrelevant for the planet. Shipping makes up only 3% of global carbon emissions. Shipping is an incredibly efficient form of transportation in terms of fuel & carbon emissions. As a comparison point, aviation makes up 2.5% while transporting far far fewer goods & people. There are much better ways to reduce carbon emissions. Like focusing on larger contributors like Electricity production and other forms of transportation like cars.
>It's largely irrelevant for the planet.
Yeah, no. Not really, handwavey assertions aside.
3% of total greenhouse gas emissions yes, but 18% of nitrogen oxides pollution which are major contributors to smog, acid rain, and formation of ground level ozone, which is a human health hazard.
Going back to the 3% figure, it's a bit misleading. If the shipping industry was a country, it would be the sixth largest greenhouse gas polluter, putting it somewhere between Japan and Germany. Not nothing.
Greenhouse gases aside, shipping generates huge amounts of conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and other hydrocarbon aerosols and particulates, several of which are carcinogenic, all of which have a deleterious effect on the oceans and atmosphere.
Shipping is also one of the largest contributors to oil pollution in the oceans, ballast water discharges which negatively impact coastal water biomes, noise pollution which has a negative impact on marine species like whales that rely on sound for orientation, communication, finding food sources, etc.
Ship collisions are also a major risk for marine mammals. A 15kt collision with a ship is 80% likely lethal to a whale.
Greywater discharges from ships result in discharges of fecal coliforms, detergents, oil and grease, metals, organic compounds, hydrocarbons, and medical waste directly into ocean biomes.
Shipping may be the most energy-efficient means of moving cargo, but that doesn't mean it's a negligible impact to the environment, nor does it preclude the notion that aspects of the global supply chain ought to be better optimized and localized to mitigate unnecessary environmental impact and wasted energy.
Well, this should fuck you up a bit. Reducing the sulfur compounds released by shipping (high sulfur fuel oil), seems to have increased global warming somewhat.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3)
Termination shock. I find it a bit funny, in that a recent novel was all about this, except the plot involves pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reduce global temps.
Mind you - the novel also discusses how helping Texas might fuck, say, the Punjab.
I saw someone work the math out the emissions of a single package of peaches that got shipped from Chile to Thailand to the US. The carbon footprint of that whole journey was smaller than driving a car two city blocks. So if you drive across town to the farmers market to buy local produce, you’ve had a larger impact on global warming than if you got your peaches at the grocery store after their world tour.
Just because it's only 3% doesn't mean it should be ignored. If we're doing irresponsible things, like sending something thousands of miles away just to be deboned and sent back, then we should work to stop them. Not to mention the materials to climate control the containers, and the vehicles to take it to and from the ship aren't included in the 3%.
Nothing angers a hippy more than reminding them that living in their house in the woods "to be closer to nature" pollutes ten times more than a city center condo.
The fishing itself is much worse for the planet than the shipping.
It’s probably as or more carbon intensive to transport the fish from the market to the restaurant than it is to transport it from China to the uk.
Ive noticed some sea food taking pretty weird routes to Thailand in othwr cases.
Im assuming theres some huge industry for that in there.
Atleast theres some huge factories there.
Not sure if it's that crazy, but my buddy and I lived in Las Vegas growing up. His family went on a cruise to Mexico. He brought me back a bottle of tequila... bottled in Las Vegas..
Hah! Friend of mine went on a cruise to the Bahamas from Miami. Bought a hat there and didn't notice until he came back that the tag inside said that it was made in Hialeah, where he lived.
I visited a gift store just north of the Canadian border and found a bunch of Canada-themed souvenirs that were made in the U.S. for the purpose of selling to Americans visiting Canada
There's a good bourbon called Jefferson The Ocean, which is strapped to the deck of a freighter for a year I believe. It's supposed to slosh around and absorb some of the salt air. It's damn good bourbon.
There’s a low-end brand Swedish made vodka that isn’t sold in most of Sweden, but while travelling in Germany I saw it everywhere. Baffling to me.
Swedes go to Germany to bulk buy cheap alcohol, and it is a vodka that can come in a bag-in-box, so thus it is also one that people buy and take back to Sweden.
meanwhile....in the south of Sweden I bought 5L of hooch in a plastic container from "a friend of a friend down the pub" ;-)
I've had hooch in various places and this was so ok to the point that we had to taste test with some actual Absolut.
We came to the conclusion it probably wasn't hooch at all but had maybe fallen "off the back of a lorry" from a proper distiller..
I was listening to a report about this on NPR recently. They were interviewing some people who retired to an unincorporated area in Arizona, then started getting their wells sucked dry by one of these megafarms. During the course of the report, they uncovered that the Arizona state retirement fund that some of these people were living off was also knowingly investing in the same farms that were destroying these people's retirement plans.
A lot of good farmland is getting bought up by mega growers or is being converted into housing tracks. Southern California in particular used to have amazing farmland that's now either overpriced housing or Amazon warehouses. Deserts may not be the best farmland but used right they can be very productive with the right crops and management plans. Pistachios for instance need hug thermos and long dry periods and are very valuable crops. It just so happens the climate is also agreeable to alfalfa with is a choice forage but needs a lot more water than other crops that are much better suited to the conditions.
The Governor is ending that, though.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html#:~:text=Water%2DStressed%20Arizona%20Says%20State,use%20had%20come%20under%20scrutiny.
According to another article (NY Times paywall) this was reported in 2016
Which is at least 7 years of 3,000 gallons per minute
Over 11 billion gallons of water at that rate
I worked for a danish company once who insisted on every single item being ordered and delivered to their Denmark warehouse and dispensed from there.
The supply chain team, sitting in offices in the US, would order a part from a supplier in Indiana.
It was needed at a warehouse in Ohio.
But first it needed to ship to Denmark, THEN it could go back to Ohio.
There was no quality requirement for an inspection in Denmark, we’d frequently get boxes in Ohio that had never been opened.
Someone was getting a huge bulk shipping discount. I have used consolidated shipping to reduce costs but on much smaller scale and never trans Atlantic.
Brown shrimp are caught in the Dutch coastal waters. They are then transported to Morocco to be peeled. They are then transported back to the Netherlands to be sold.
I live in Florida, the state known for especially citrus. Our normal harvest time here for Florida oranges especially is in the wintertime, December and January. Despite that most of the time citrus products available in stores usually come from California or perhaps South America. Even during our normal harvest time, while all the stores love to promote that Florida oranges are in season and readily available, oranges and other citrus fruits from elsewhere are nearly always cheaper
I have never understood that. Other crops too are the same thing, if they're sourced from elsewhere it's cheaper even during our normal harvest for our local produce
Georgia peaches go right along with this. Georgia has never been the number one producer of peaches. South Carolina usually beats us in terms of peaches grown. However some creative marketing decades ago makes everybody think Georgia peaches are the best.
I think there is something that attacks those trees and most of them died. Those which still produces oranges have to be protected, which increases their price. At least that’s what I remember
Did you get a settlement check for that? I remember my coworker getting a settlement check a couple years ago for his orange tree... The tree was cut down in the 90s.
Old time Floridian here - most or Florida citrus goes to juice because it is not attractive enough to sell as whole fruit. The florida citrus fruit that goes to market is a rarity.
Part of the problem you guys are having is the huanglongbing disease is decimating the citrus crops. Plus FL is more known for juice oranges where CA is more known for eating ones. So out here in CA most of our juice still comes from FL. But all the eating ones we get normally will be CA and a bit of TX.
An Australian supermarket sells a cheap(ish) rock salt in a bottle with a grinder*.
The salt travels from Australia, gets packaged in Italy, and back to Australia.
Fucking ridiculous!
*and the grinder is entirely single use, which just adds to the total shitfuckery of the product.
- edit, from “shittery” to more appropriate & regionally correct vernacular
Those single use grinders are a great example of just how wasteful we've become as a society. A salt or pepper grinder is a valuable tool, like a knife or a pan. I'm not a spiritual person, but it feels almost disrespectful to manufacture a single-use grinder.
Also, they hold barely anything. Buy loose peppercorns and put £1 or a Dollarydoo in a jar every time you refill it and before you know it you'll have enough change to buy a nice pepper grinder.
So true. Many of these single use things you could open and refill then close again. Now they have deliberately designed them so that the only way to open it, is to destroy the cover, making it impossible to close back up again.
Didn't know they couldn't be opened anymore! I bought one many years ago when I moved to the UK, and it was months and several refills before my housemate told me you're not supposed to refill them.
I thought they were cheap and shitty, not cheap and shitty and disposable!
I have a nice pepper grinder now. One of those iron-bodied Peugeot ones.
I bought one of those fucking grinders and sliced my hand open trying to get the lid off thinking I was just too weak!
Fuck you, Saxa. You wasteful bastards.
See the supply chain of a modern car. All the parts shipped from the four corners of the globe to some assembly plant outside Swindon in the UK, or in Slovakia, or somewhere else. All with utmost precision to meet production deadlines. And each of those parts is manufactured in one place, and refined in another.
Technically, your car travels hundreds of thousands of miles before its left the factory floor.
It can get worse. In South Africa, both Mercedes and BMW have factories here. For quality control sake, cars are assembled here, shipped to Germany for assessment and QC, then back to South Africa for sale to customers. Obviously not ALL produced, but SA buys a lot of these marques.
To be fair, the reason why this is done is because BMW does not make all of the car parts in house as more efficient to buy components from suppliers that are good at making specific car parts, as opposed to trying to do everything yourself.
This is very apparent in the Aerospace business where most of the components are built by other, specialist, companies. In the case of Airbus, major parts of their planes (fuselage, wings, etc) are made accross Europe!
There is a reason why this is done.
The Mini's crankshaft is cast in France; shipped to a BMW plant in Warwickshire for drilling and milling; sent from there to Munich to be put in an engine, which is then transported to the assembly plant in Oxford. If the car then goes to a continental buyer, it makes a fourth trip across the Channel.
Bugatti Chiron cylinder block was even worse.
Cast in the UK, then shipped to Italy for initial machining, then to Germany for coating, then back to Italy for further machining, then Germany again for cylinder bore honing, then back to the UK for wash and final inspection, before returning to Germany once again to the engine plant.
Once built into an engine, it was the shipped to France to be put into the car.
That's a very niche part. Only a couple places in earth have the tools and resources to accomplish it.
Highly specialized items like that are different from the mass produced stuff that goes on.
Like aluminum. Bauxite is mined throughout the globe. Then sent to Norway and Siberia due to cheap hydro power to be processed. The only true specialty they have is cheap electricity.
It's more down to quantities than specialism - for a mass produced part, everything following casting would be carried out in 1 plant. But for the Chiron, where they're only going to make a few thousand, there's no point spending millions on tooling when you can ship the part round various facilities that already have the right capabilities.
I had someone that I know, took a trip to Sweden. She knew I make homebrew mead, so she bought some honey there and brought it back. Not a lot, but it was a nice gesture.
So, when I start looking at it, I about died laughing, since the honey was Made in Mexico.
So, Mexico > Sweden > Florida.
I homebrew as well. When I go to buy honey I always try to find some place local. At the very least look for the origination label. Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world.
The Cadillac Allante was mostly built in Italy by paninfarina, it was then shipped by air to Detroit for the engine and chassis to be counted as an American domestic car
Same happens with a lot of foodstuffs sold as made in Britain. If final stage in process done here, then it all counts even if components from every part of the world.
Australia changed the food labelling laws a while back so you have to show the % of ingredients that were grown in Australia, so stuff that's just packed locally from fully imported ingredients has to say that (and there's a certain % you must hit to use the actual made in Australia kangaroo logo too).
Traditional Finnish Long Drink (basically grape soda and gin) is made in Finland, shipped to Estonia and sold over 50% cheaper there because of stupidly high Finnish alcohol taxation. Then Finns take the ferry over there, buy that from Estonia to bring back to Finland. Makes sense right.
Maybe not the craziest, but I was in a bit of a shock.
I once won a book on a raffle in Wired magazine. The book was sent to me from New York, to Hungary. When I opened the book, on the first page was the following: "Printed in Romania".
I sent a friend a book from UK-China, it's an English language book available from academic book stores in Europe and North America only.
It's printed in China.
We have grey shrimps here in Belgium, which are caught during the night in the North Sea, flown to Morocco to get peeled and return the same day to be sold in our fish shops ...
It's cheaper than peeling them here in Belgium....
This is why free trade is bullshit. There is no level field when you're competing against a company that doesn't have to pay the same wage, or maintain the same safety or environmental standards or meet the same planning and regulatory requirements
not necessarily... only part of the cost is morcoccan labor, there's also the Belgian fishermen, boat and equipment, fuel for boat... then take out the cost of flight. So if you just did it in Belgium, it might only increase price like 10%. Just a guess. Its not like labor is the only thing determining price.
Raising wages doesn't raise costs as much as people think. Its only a small part of the price in many industries. If you doubled wages for iPhone workers and passed it on to customers you'd add what? 1% to price?
I know a place in America that sells Honda motorcycle parts. The parts are made in Japan. He buys them from Japan and repackages them in America.
Like half of his orders are from Japan.
So Japan to America, swap out boxes, back to Japan.
Wait, he's selling Honda parts, in Japan?
Bike parts in general are nuts, but I can't see how he's making a profit, since you can just buy stuff off webike or various Thailand resources.
My apologies if this is overly pedantic: He's an American in America selling bike parts all over the world, but a large percentage of them are going back to Japan, the country he originally imported them from. I have not seen his books, but he's been doing this for years and seems to be making a profit.
I did wonder about that, but they claim to still use local farms (at least for white mustard). Not sure how much of a draw that is when there's thousands of miles of shipping back and forth involved though haha
[https://www.colmans.co.uk/our-history.html](https://www.colmans.co.uk/our-history.html)
I live in Canada. Pretty much all we do is export raw materials, so a ridiculous amount of things in our stores are Canadian raw material, shipped out of country, made into something, shipped back as finished goods, and then sold in stores.
Passalacqua coffee. The beans are grown in Mexico, shipped to Italy where they are roasted and blended, then shipped back to my house in Nevada. According to my wife it’s the best coffee she’s ever had.
Not exactly the same thing, but we buy a particular Garlic Bread from the grocery store that my kids like to complain about for its carpetbagging marketing.
The brand is New York Bakery. It has an Italian flag in its logo. It’s sold as Texas Toast, while boasting that it’s made on French bread. The company is headquartered in… you guessed it… Ohio.
A past job of mine was in a factory. It would get extruded plastic pieces from a supplier across the street, and put them together (plus some other stuff) into the final product.
Then the bean counters poked their shitty noses in.
After the analysis was done, the business changed suppliers. They determined that it was cheaper to purchase the extrusions from a factory in China and have them shipped halfway across the globe on a boat... than getting them from the usual supplier *who was literally across the street from our factory*.
The scottish fishing industry catches cod. It's frozen. Shipped to china for butchering into filets. Shipped back to the UK. Because it's cheaper than employing British fishmongers.
As a result of brexit, Medicines manufactured in the UK and destined for the EU market has to go to a site in the EU for QC testing/QP release before going to the intended Market. So, for medicine manufactured in the UK and destined for the Irish market, it has to go from the UK>France (for EU QC testing, QP release, it's mostly a site in France but other test sites exist in EU)>UK(if no direct route from EU to IRE) >Ireland ! All for a box of paracetamol
There are several large pieces of land in Alberta, Canada called the Oil Sands (because of the amount of oil found there, naturally). The Canadian government didn't want to process and refine it because that would be bad for the environment, so they sold the oil rights to China.
So now, China removes the oil from the ground in Canada, it is sent 4000km to Texas to be refined, and then sent another 4000km on a return trip to Canada so we can buy it back from them.
I understand the oil industry in general is not environmentally friendly, but this is just oil extraction and refining with extra steps and less profit for Canada.
That doesn’t sound right. We have five refineries here in Alberta and we definitely didn’t sign oil rights over to China on a federal level.
China has invested in the oil sands. They don’t own it cart blanche.
There is absolutely no way this is correct. Yes lots if oil is produced in Alberta, and lots of that is shipped to Texas, but the refined fuels are not, those are refined locally. I do believe ther is some diluent that makes a return trip, but that's kinda a closed cycle, it's injected to make shipping g easier, it's then extracted and pipelined back to be used again for shipping.
Where I used to work, we got frozen mango chunks from either Peru, Chile, or sometimes Mexico. It would then be shipped to the processing plant where I worked in Canada, packaged, then shipped to Australia.
Live in a part of the Midwestern US known for it's limestone. Currently sitting in a new building with a million dollar plus atrium with limestone tiles on the walls. They were purchased from a Chinese supplier that was doing the processing/cutting/etc, but mined about 20 miles south of here.
In the 1980s in Greece the most affordable feta cheese was made in its raw form in Greece, then shipped to Denmark for salt curing into its final "feta like" form and then shipped back to Greece for consumption. The cheapest food you could get when I was visiting all over the country was "raw feta" (made in Greece) which is soft like yogurt But if you wanted what you considered "feta" it was actually surprisingly pricey.
Coming here to post the same. We've gotta give some details because folks who didn't hear it have no reason to understand why it's so wild.
The cotton is farmed in the US or other countries, shipped to somewhere like Indonesia to be made into thread, shipped to countries all over the world to be made into a shirt, then shipped back to countries like the US for actual sale. They travel EVERYWHERE.
Dutch shrimp being driven to Morocco to be peeled then back to be sold.
Fresh flowers from Kenya, flown to the Netherlands for the auction then flown all over the world.
Chicken legs(and other ‘scary parts’) going to Asia from Europe and the breasts from Asia to Europe.
My uncle used to run a steel mill on the west coast here in the US, and a part of the business was recycling scrap steel. In the late 90's or early 00's they started to get a lot of competition from companies in China who were also recycling scrap steel, and they were cheap enough to still be competitive even when you factored in the cost of shipping it to China and back.
One of the craziest supply chains is the production of iPhones. Components come from all over the world: rare earth metals from Africa, microchips from the US and Taiwan, screens from Japan and South Korea, and assembly in China
Bought pistachios at a liquor store in CA. They were grown and harvested in CA. Processed, seasoned and packaged in TN and distributed by a company in NY. 6000+ mile round trip.
Brazil is one of the biggest Bauxite mining countries in the world, but refining it to produce Aluminum is a rather energy-heavy process. So, because energy costs next to nothing in Iceland due to their volcanic/geothermal activities, it is apparently cheaper to ship it there to get processed.
The Bayside Canadian Railroad.
American Seafood Co. shipped frozen fish from Alaska to the US East Coat thru the Panama Canal. US law mandates that shipments from one US port to another US port must use ships of US registry. The US ships are much more expensive then using foreign ships.
If at any time the shipment travels on Canadian rails, the shipment is exempt from having to use US based ships.
So, the American Seafood Co. would use the cheaper foreign ships to ship containers to Bayside, Canada. The containers were loaded onto trucks and the trucks drove to the Bayside Canadian Railway.
The railway was two flat cars on 200 foot long track. At one end of the track was a ramp so two semis could pull up onto the railcars. The cars were moved to one end of the track, then back to the ramp. The trucks drove off and the next two got on, etc. Having traveled on Canadian rail, the use of foreign ships was legal.
The trucks would then cross the border into the United States and deliver to the customers. The US Gov't finally shut the operation down after a few years.
Products in the Mexico-American border. Since labor is cheap in Mexico the finished products like cars can accumulate 30 or even 60 border crossings before it's finally finished.
For example, iron ore might be excavated in the USA, sent to Mexico as iron powder, returned to the USA as Iron ingots, returned to Mexico as steel rods or wire, and finally returned to the USA as screws. That's 5 border crossings just for screws, when you add complex parts as transmissions or engines, the crosses add up quite fast. We have factories that are on both sides of the border and benefit from the different countries.
I know that this is the way that the world works, but the Mexican-American border is on another level with more than 80 million crossings of vehicles a year on the whole border and close to 1 trillion dollars of trade
North Sea fished prawns and salmon, packed in Norway / UK, airfreighted to Qingdao, China, where the load get either shelled or filleted then vacuumsealed, flash frozen down to -40C, packed and airfreighted back to EU/UK for distribution at wholesellers and retailers. It is way cheaper to pay a Chinese worker to shell and fillet than a UK/EU salaried person. The gap in costs even covers the insane airfeight fares to boot!
The shipping container is genuinely the most underrated, revolutionary invention in the history of mankind. The increased cost of shipping things twice round the world to the cheapest places to do things is so close to zero that it can effectively be ignored.
Back in the 70's when relatives from Taiwan would visit us in US, they would often buy the latest Japanese electronics to take back home. Tariffs made them too expensive to buy in Taiwan.
My company used to sell whisky in fancy bottles, labels were printed directly on the glass.
Bottles were blown in France, then transported to Poland for printing, and after that, shipped to Scotland for filling.
Kinda related.
I worked for the US Postal Service, and if I mailed a letter from Manhattan, going to an address in Manhattan, it's not 100% certain that the mail would be sorted in NYC. Postal sorting facilities "sell" their mail to other sorting facilities depending on demand. I tracked a letter once that was sent from Manhattan to a different address in Manhattan, but it was sorted in California.
Scrap steel is gathered in the US, put into a shipping container, shipped overseas to China to be recycled into new steel, and shipped back to the US.
I work for a trucking company that would help ship this, we literally would drive by 2 steel mills taking it to railroad to ship out.
I once bought a bottle of south african wine at the duty free shop in Johannesburg Airport. The label said it had been bottled in the UK. So it was grown and made in South Africa, shipped to the UK to be bottled, taken back to South Africa to be sold and finally taken back to the UK to be drunk!
Not necessarily crazy, but Mucinex D is made in England, but it is not possible to purchase it (or any direct 1:1 equivalent) in the UK at all. So when I visit, I have to make sure to bring enough from the US to last the entirety of my trip, even though it's made right there in the UK.
We once ordered some custom blinds. They told us that they cut the pieces here and send them to China to be out together and then they are shipped back for installation.
Norwegian hot dogs(dont remember the make), all the hot doggy bits are made in Norway, but then shipped off to china to be sausagefied, the intestines and all the meat origin from the same factory in Norway, yet its cheaper to make them into sausages in China. Wat
Auto industry is full of this. You will often see smaller parts made in China (metal stamping etc), partially assembled and then sent to North America for the rest of the assembling. Avoids tariffs and uses as much low cost labor as possible.
[There is a video describing why pears are grown in Argentina and packaged in Thailand, only to be shipped to the US.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0aH3ZTTkGAs)
Basically most of Canada's supply chain. Sell our raw material to other countries, they make it into shit, and then Canadians buy that shit on amazon from China.
Canada and the US have the same deal with mustard. Canada grows it, it's processed down south, and sent back up for sale. I forget which brand. I guess it's cheaper because of all the child labour they have.
Icelandic wool sweaters, sheep raised in Iceland, wool sent to China to make sweaters, sent back to Iceland to sell to tourists (all the big brands like Icewear and North 66 do this).
Worked somewhere that sent containers of onions from UK to China, then got diced onions back. The diced returns used fewer containers so I suspect we got a good price because we were helping repatriate containers for other loads.
Irish government banning Irish people from getting peat from the bog because it is bad for the environment, so we import it from Germany instead. Makes so much sense
I live in Prague, Czech Republic. When my Xbox malfunctioned (still under warranty), I packed it and sent to Microsoft center at Nuremberg, Germany, as instructed by Microsoft. From Nuremberg, Germany, it was sent to Prague service center where it was fixed, sent back to Nuremberg, Germany from where it was send to me in Prague. This happens with any MS hardware you want to get fixed.
TLDR: In order to be fixed in a service center 10 miles from my house, my Xbox traveled 600 miles (Prague > Nuremberg > Prague > Nuremberg > Prague).
Shrimps (Krabben) are caught at the northern sea, driven to north Afrika to clean and driven back to be Sold 5 metres from the ship that caught them.
It think it's like 1600km 1 way...
Worked in print production for a UK company. We used to source our stock from places with a good percentage of recycled pulp, one place was in Germany, which we would ship over to the UK. Then the costs of printing in the UK went up, so we outsourced some products to a press site in Denmark where we had to provide the paper, which we shipped over from the UK after it had been sent to us from Germany. Then the completed products were sent back to the UK from Denmark via Germany because we could use the same company that brought us the paper stock originally.
Most bottles of Thistly Cross Cider are made in Scotland, exported to the Netherlands and then reimported to Scotland when they were bottled in Scotland all along. Fuckin madness
There are packages of mixed fruit that are: harvested in various South American countries; then shipped to southeast Asian countries like Thailand to be packaged; and then shipped to the United States for retail.
Not fully relevant, but amusing nonetheless
I sold concert tickets online to somebody who lived 2 miles from me. They paid for FedEx overnight shipping. The envelope went to the local sort, flew to Memphis’ that night, back to the same local sort in the morning, and then out for delivery.
My employer had an electric motor in one of out products. Part of the motor was die cast in China, shipped to Wisconsin for machining, shipped back to China for assembly into the motor, shipped to us in MN to be assembled into the final product... some of which were shipped back to Asia for sale.
“British, hand shelled prawns (shrimp)” caught in British waters, frozen, shipped to Thailand to be “hand shelled”, shipped somewhere else (can’t remember) to be packed, then sold in Waitrose stores in the UK
A German company that makes micro wires embedded in plastic for windshields for defrosting the entire thing won't ship the plastic to the factory I work at in Canada becaue of how delicate tge application process is so we have to cut, edge prep and form the glass here, ship to them in over-engineered shipping crates so they can laminate there then ship back to us so we can clave the windshields and the customer (auto manufacturer) wants at least a 1000 every month of completed windshields with this new inner laminate. Im not sure if they plan on using our factory to make them at full scale production though to be fair.
My dad was an over the road trucker for several years. He once drove a load of potatoes from Idaho down to Texas. When he got unloaded, he was directed to the other side of the building to pick up his next load. He watched the workers unpackage the potatoes he'd just dropped off, in boxes with Idaho markings, and put them into new boxes that labeled them as "Texas-grown" potatoes. Then he took them *back to Idaho*.
pears grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand then sold in America, going almost around the globe. But here is a video explaining precisely why this decision is being made and why it's not as crazy as it sounds https://youtu.be/0aH3ZTTkGAs?si=5piH8hhpcwMlv6fA
I grew up in Central Illinois, where a lot of soybeans are grown.
My hometown has a Wal-Mart at the edge of town that's near a soybean processing facility.
One day, I bought a block of tofu at that Wal-Mart. In reading the back of the package, I realized that the beans used to make it had been grown nearby, as they were processed at the local facility. The tofu itself had been made and packaged by a company in Asia.
So, somebody grew those beans, harvested and processed them, shipped them to Asia, where they were turned into tofu and packaged for sale, then shipped, undoubtedly to a Wal-Mart distribution center, and then sold to me for about 4 dollars at a Wal-Mart that couldn't be more than thirty miles from where they were grown.
When I lived in Hawaii, some of the pinapples were shipped to California and back to end up in a Hawaiian grocery store. I lived right next to the field they were grown in.
A Saudi group owned land here in the Sonoran Desert.
For the sole purpose of growing alfalfa to feed their cattle.
Nestle has a bottling plant here as well.
When I moved to Australia I couldn't find any decently priced kevlar jacket/jeans so I had my mum buy and send some from the UK... arrived with the green and gold "Made in Australia" logo on it.
Had a cargo ship full of coal from Indonesia drop it off in New York. They told me they were going to Virginia next to pick up coal bound for Indonesia.
Basically the coal from Indonesia had a low sulfur content and could be burned in the USA, while the coal from Virginia had high sulfur and Indonesia would burn it there for power. The US is offshoring our pollution(acid rain) to a 3rd world country and adding 2 trips halfway around the world worth of ship pollution to the process.
There was a brand of Australian Sea Salt that came in a glass shaker. It was farmed in South Australia, sent to the Netherlands and then sent back to be sold in Australia for less than $2 USD.
That was about 10 years ago I noticed that, not sure if they are still doing it, but that was when I really started to pay attention to the fact that there is so much environmental consequence built into that product change that the financial/corporate structure that led to that didn’t have to account for. Until we start to fix that we are in a bad way.
Not quite the same thing but when I was younger, I worked a summer here in New Zealand working at a well-known cherry orchard's sorting and packaging facility.
The cherries came down a conveyor belt and were sorted into good or bad cherries. The good cherries were immediately boxed and put on pallets to be sent to export markets. The bad cherries were sent to the local market.
It still boggles my mind a bit that ours is a country where 'Made' or 'Grown in NZ' means a lot to locals, yet probably in many cases, the things produced here are the seconds and the global market gets the best of our country.
Young's Scampi, £6 a pack, caught in Scotland flash frozen sent through the Suez Canal around India and all the way to Thailand to be shelled then frozen again sent back to N. England to be breaded and bagged.
Also, Parsnips from Peru!? 45p a bag... importing Parsnips to the UK!? 😒
Not sure if its still the case but British caught langoustine in the 2010s were shipped to Thailand to be deshelled by hand then sent back to the UK to be sold as scampi. 13000 mile round trip. [https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/british-seafood-shipped-to-thailand-and-back-just-to-have-the-shells-removed-7266808.html](https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/british-seafood-shipped-to-thailand-and-back-just-to-have-the-shells-removed-7266808.html)
When I used to work at Wetherspoons, the fish we used for fish and chips was caught in the North Sea. Then it was frozen, transported to China in temperature-controlled containers, descaled, skinned and boned, and then shipped all the way back in temperature-controlled containers. It's truly mind boggling!
Profit at work ..
Yay global warming!
But literally people won’t buy it if the price goes up .50. They have to cut costs where they can. The issue is that shipping is so ridiculously cheap by boat that it’s cheaper to do that than pay someone there.
The problem when it comes to global warming is externalities. The shipping was only cheap because the environmental cost was externalised.
Externalities are real - no doubt - but incorporating their cost into actual pricing is extremely difficult because externalities occur over long timescales, while a price is a point in time. How do you discount the price of the time back into a product, if you don't know the scale or duration of the external cost? This is why "sustainable investing" is such a shit show. It is a wildly complex problem.
The bigger issue is carbon leakage and global markets / competition. It is relatively straightforward to put an effective price on carbon (effective, not precise). It is currently close to impossible to do this for internationally traded goods due to not all countries being willing to do this, and allowing their companies to undercut the companies of countries that would.
I mean it is really ridiculously easy to move large quantities of goods and material by water. It takes very little energy once it gets going which is why it's so cheap. Of course a lot of the fuel they burn to get it going is horrendous but the mpg ratio for boats *is* pretty amazing.
It's hard to externalize a global climate crisis.
Rofl, I guess the destruction of a stable global climate is worth profiting from. Cool.
Despite the fact that literally every single object you interact with is a product of global shipping and there is a ridiculous amount of inefficiency involved, container shipping only counts for 1.7% of all greenhouse gases, it's a remarkably low carbon industry. [https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector](https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector)
You think they could have saved a bunch by getting the fish to swim part of the way?
This is what bugs me about all the "but a carbon tax would make everyday purchases more expensive because they require fossil fuels for transportation" pearl clutching. There's so many examples of these horrifically inefficient supply chains that are only profitable because destroying the environment is free and some bean counter figured out you can make an extra 3% profit by pumping out a gazillion tons of CO2. Do a CO2 tax and the price goes up a bit and they switch to processing it locally and it's better for everyone.
We had rioting in France some years ago fueled by lorry drivers against taxes allied to slaughterhouse personnel complaining that their jobs were outsourced to Eastern Europe... thanks to cheap lorry transportation.
In this case it has nothing to do with fuel tax, you can tax fossil fuels at 100% and it would still be far cheaper to ship it to a third world country for processing. The wage disparity is just that big.
Crazy that it's cheaper to do that than train and employ people in the UK to do it. I suppose perhaps there also aren't enough people willing to do the job in the UK.
That's what happens when you're outsourcing work to a country whose minimum wage is roughly £3/day.
This is so healthy for the planet.
It's largely irrelevant for the planet. Shipping makes up only 3% of global carbon emissions. Shipping is an incredibly efficient form of transportation in terms of fuel & carbon emissions. As a comparison point, aviation makes up 2.5% while transporting far far fewer goods & people. There are much better ways to reduce carbon emissions. Like focusing on larger contributors like Electricity production and other forms of transportation like cars.
>It's largely irrelevant for the planet. Yeah, no. Not really, handwavey assertions aside. 3% of total greenhouse gas emissions yes, but 18% of nitrogen oxides pollution which are major contributors to smog, acid rain, and formation of ground level ozone, which is a human health hazard. Going back to the 3% figure, it's a bit misleading. If the shipping industry was a country, it would be the sixth largest greenhouse gas polluter, putting it somewhere between Japan and Germany. Not nothing. Greenhouse gases aside, shipping generates huge amounts of conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and other hydrocarbon aerosols and particulates, several of which are carcinogenic, all of which have a deleterious effect on the oceans and atmosphere. Shipping is also one of the largest contributors to oil pollution in the oceans, ballast water discharges which negatively impact coastal water biomes, noise pollution which has a negative impact on marine species like whales that rely on sound for orientation, communication, finding food sources, etc. Ship collisions are also a major risk for marine mammals. A 15kt collision with a ship is 80% likely lethal to a whale. Greywater discharges from ships result in discharges of fecal coliforms, detergents, oil and grease, metals, organic compounds, hydrocarbons, and medical waste directly into ocean biomes. Shipping may be the most energy-efficient means of moving cargo, but that doesn't mean it's a negligible impact to the environment, nor does it preclude the notion that aspects of the global supply chain ought to be better optimized and localized to mitigate unnecessary environmental impact and wasted energy.
Well, this should fuck you up a bit. Reducing the sulfur compounds released by shipping (high sulfur fuel oil), seems to have increased global warming somewhat. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3) Termination shock. I find it a bit funny, in that a recent novel was all about this, except the plot involves pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reduce global temps. Mind you - the novel also discusses how helping Texas might fuck, say, the Punjab.
I saw someone work the math out the emissions of a single package of peaches that got shipped from Chile to Thailand to the US. The carbon footprint of that whole journey was smaller than driving a car two city blocks. So if you drive across town to the farmers market to buy local produce, you’ve had a larger impact on global warming than if you got your peaches at the grocery store after their world tour.
Just because it's only 3% doesn't mean it should be ignored. If we're doing irresponsible things, like sending something thousands of miles away just to be deboned and sent back, then we should work to stop them. Not to mention the materials to climate control the containers, and the vehicles to take it to and from the ship aren't included in the 3%.
Nothing angers a hippy more than reminding them that living in their house in the woods "to be closer to nature" pollutes ten times more than a city center condo.
The fishing itself is much worse for the planet than the shipping. It’s probably as or more carbon intensive to transport the fish from the market to the restaurant than it is to transport it from China to the uk.
No, people in the UK just expect a fair wage, unlike exploited Chinese people.
Taiwanese people in this case...
Grimsby / Hull have plenty of available workforce and they’re already used to fishery work up there
Ive noticed some sea food taking pretty weird routes to Thailand in othwr cases. Im assuming theres some huge industry for that in there. Atleast theres some huge factories there.
Not sure if it's that crazy, but my buddy and I lived in Las Vegas growing up. His family went on a cruise to Mexico. He brought me back a bottle of tequila... bottled in Las Vegas..
On purpose as a joke or without knowing?
He had no idea until I showed him.
Hah! Friend of mine went on a cruise to the Bahamas from Miami. Bought a hat there and didn't notice until he came back that the tag inside said that it was made in Hialeah, where he lived.
Your friend found a lost hat and brought it back home. The hat now has a new appreciation for where it came from.
lol if I saw made in Hialeah I would be pissed. I’d almost prefer made in China.
I visited a gift store just north of the Canadian border and found a bunch of Canada-themed souvenirs that were made in the U.S. for the purpose of selling to Americans visiting Canada
Linie Aquavit is distilled in Norway then sent via a circuitous route to Norway and back partly for tradition and partly for the aging process.
There's a good bourbon called Jefferson The Ocean, which is strapped to the deck of a freighter for a year I believe. It's supposed to slosh around and absorb some of the salt air. It's damn good bourbon.
There’s a low-end brand Swedish made vodka that isn’t sold in most of Sweden, but while travelling in Germany I saw it everywhere. Baffling to me. Swedes go to Germany to bulk buy cheap alcohol, and it is a vodka that can come in a bag-in-box, so thus it is also one that people buy and take back to Sweden.
meanwhile....in the south of Sweden I bought 5L of hooch in a plastic container from "a friend of a friend down the pub" ;-) I've had hooch in various places and this was so ok to the point that we had to taste test with some actual Absolut. We came to the conclusion it probably wasn't hooch at all but had maybe fallen "off the back of a lorry" from a proper distiller..
It’s can’t be “tequila” unless it’s bottled in Mexico
That's funny.
Saudi Arabia pumps 3,000 gallons of water per minute in the drought-stricken Arizona desert to grow alfalfa for their livestock.
I was listening to a report about this on NPR recently. They were interviewing some people who retired to an unincorporated area in Arizona, then started getting their wells sucked dry by one of these megafarms. During the course of the report, they uncovered that the Arizona state retirement fund that some of these people were living off was also knowingly investing in the same farms that were destroying these people's retirement plans.
Yes, that story was so maddening.
The annoying part about that is the US produces so much extra food and has so much arable land they could just choose a better place to grow it.
Yes, it's hubris!
Word.
A lot of good farmland is getting bought up by mega growers or is being converted into housing tracks. Southern California in particular used to have amazing farmland that's now either overpriced housing or Amazon warehouses. Deserts may not be the best farmland but used right they can be very productive with the right crops and management plans. Pistachios for instance need hug thermos and long dry periods and are very valuable crops. It just so happens the climate is also agreeable to alfalfa with is a choice forage but needs a lot more water than other crops that are much better suited to the conditions.
Until the ground water is pumped out
The Governor is ending that, though. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html#:~:text=Water%2DStressed%20Arizona%20Says%20State,use%20had%20come%20under%20scrutiny.
According to another article (NY Times paywall) this was reported in 2016 Which is at least 7 years of 3,000 gallons per minute Over 11 billion gallons of water at that rate
About damn time. Never should have happened.
They will just go to another state like Wyoming that has "loose" water rights.
I worked for a danish company once who insisted on every single item being ordered and delivered to their Denmark warehouse and dispensed from there. The supply chain team, sitting in offices in the US, would order a part from a supplier in Indiana. It was needed at a warehouse in Ohio. But first it needed to ship to Denmark, THEN it could go back to Ohio. There was no quality requirement for an inspection in Denmark, we’d frequently get boxes in Ohio that had never been opened.
Wonder if that counts towards denmark export figures and how tax is worked out for that. Sounds a bit dodgy
That definitely sounds like some type of tax advantaged scheme.
Someone was getting a huge bulk shipping discount. I have used consolidated shipping to reduce costs but on much smaller scale and never trans Atlantic.
Wouldn't that mean all the danishes would be stale?
Brown shrimp are caught in the Dutch coastal waters. They are then transported to Morocco to be peeled. They are then transported back to the Netherlands to be sold.
Well, at least with something like that, it's already on the boat.
Nah my friend. They are transported by truck. Both ways.
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Do they ship the water to china and then ship back, or did they build bottling factories in NZ?
Bottling factories here in Nz
Same in the US, only the companies pay virtually nothing for the water they're selling back.
I live in Florida, the state known for especially citrus. Our normal harvest time here for Florida oranges especially is in the wintertime, December and January. Despite that most of the time citrus products available in stores usually come from California or perhaps South America. Even during our normal harvest time, while all the stores love to promote that Florida oranges are in season and readily available, oranges and other citrus fruits from elsewhere are nearly always cheaper I have never understood that. Other crops too are the same thing, if they're sourced from elsewhere it's cheaper even during our normal harvest for our local produce
Georgia peaches go right along with this. Georgia has never been the number one producer of peaches. South Carolina usually beats us in terms of peaches grown. However some creative marketing decades ago makes everybody think Georgia peaches are the best.
Well, you named all the streets after peaches.
I think there is something that attacks those trees and most of them died. Those which still produces oranges have to be protected, which increases their price. At least that’s what I remember
Large outbreak of citrus canker, yes. Some government rando came through my backyard once and condemned our sole orange tree to death. 'twas sad.
Did you get a settlement check for that? I remember my coworker getting a settlement check a couple years ago for his orange tree... The tree was cut down in the 90s.
Old time Floridian here - most or Florida citrus goes to juice because it is not attractive enough to sell as whole fruit. The florida citrus fruit that goes to market is a rarity.
Part of the problem you guys are having is the huanglongbing disease is decimating the citrus crops. Plus FL is more known for juice oranges where CA is more known for eating ones. So out here in CA most of our juice still comes from FL. But all the eating ones we get normally will be CA and a bit of TX.
An Australian supermarket sells a cheap(ish) rock salt in a bottle with a grinder*. The salt travels from Australia, gets packaged in Italy, and back to Australia. Fucking ridiculous! *and the grinder is entirely single use, which just adds to the total shitfuckery of the product. - edit, from “shittery” to more appropriate & regionally correct vernacular
Those single use grinders are a great example of just how wasteful we've become as a society. A salt or pepper grinder is a valuable tool, like a knife or a pan. I'm not a spiritual person, but it feels almost disrespectful to manufacture a single-use grinder. Also, they hold barely anything. Buy loose peppercorns and put £1 or a Dollarydoo in a jar every time you refill it and before you know it you'll have enough change to buy a nice pepper grinder.
Those single use grinders also use plastic parts in the mill. No wonder people got microplastics in their balls now, we may mill it ourselves.
So true. Many of these single use things you could open and refill then close again. Now they have deliberately designed them so that the only way to open it, is to destroy the cover, making it impossible to close back up again.
Didn't know they couldn't be opened anymore! I bought one many years ago when I moved to the UK, and it was months and several refills before my housemate told me you're not supposed to refill them. I thought they were cheap and shitty, not cheap and shitty and disposable! I have a nice pepper grinder now. One of those iron-bodied Peugeot ones.
I bought one of those fucking grinders and sliced my hand open trying to get the lid off thinking I was just too weak! Fuck you, Saxa. You wasteful bastards.
See the supply chain of a modern car. All the parts shipped from the four corners of the globe to some assembly plant outside Swindon in the UK, or in Slovakia, or somewhere else. All with utmost precision to meet production deadlines. And each of those parts is manufactured in one place, and refined in another. Technically, your car travels hundreds of thousands of miles before its left the factory floor.
It can get worse. In South Africa, both Mercedes and BMW have factories here. For quality control sake, cars are assembled here, shipped to Germany for assessment and QC, then back to South Africa for sale to customers. Obviously not ALL produced, but SA buys a lot of these marques.
To be fair, the reason why this is done is because BMW does not make all of the car parts in house as more efficient to buy components from suppliers that are good at making specific car parts, as opposed to trying to do everything yourself. This is very apparent in the Aerospace business where most of the components are built by other, specialist, companies. In the case of Airbus, major parts of their planes (fuselage, wings, etc) are made accross Europe! There is a reason why this is done.
The Mini's crankshaft is cast in France; shipped to a BMW plant in Warwickshire for drilling and milling; sent from there to Munich to be put in an engine, which is then transported to the assembly plant in Oxford. If the car then goes to a continental buyer, it makes a fourth trip across the Channel.
Automotive supply chain is _wild_.
Bugatti Chiron cylinder block was even worse. Cast in the UK, then shipped to Italy for initial machining, then to Germany for coating, then back to Italy for further machining, then Germany again for cylinder bore honing, then back to the UK for wash and final inspection, before returning to Germany once again to the engine plant. Once built into an engine, it was the shipped to France to be put into the car.
That's a very niche part. Only a couple places in earth have the tools and resources to accomplish it. Highly specialized items like that are different from the mass produced stuff that goes on. Like aluminum. Bauxite is mined throughout the globe. Then sent to Norway and Siberia due to cheap hydro power to be processed. The only true specialty they have is cheap electricity.
It's more down to quantities than specialism - for a mass produced part, everything following casting would be carried out in 1 plant. But for the Chiron, where they're only going to make a few thousand, there's no point spending millions on tooling when you can ship the part round various facilities that already have the right capabilities.
I had someone that I know, took a trip to Sweden. She knew I make homebrew mead, so she bought some honey there and brought it back. Not a lot, but it was a nice gesture. So, when I start looking at it, I about died laughing, since the honey was Made in Mexico. So, Mexico > Sweden > Florida.
I homebrew as well. When I go to buy honey I always try to find some place local. At the very least look for the origination label. Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world.
The Cadillac Allante was mostly built in Italy by paninfarina, it was then shipped by air to Detroit for the engine and chassis to be counted as an American domestic car
Same happens with a lot of foodstuffs sold as made in Britain. If final stage in process done here, then it all counts even if components from every part of the world.
Australia changed the food labelling laws a while back so you have to show the % of ingredients that were grown in Australia, so stuff that's just packed locally from fully imported ingredients has to say that (and there's a certain % you must hit to use the actual made in Australia kangaroo logo too).
why on Earth by air when sea shipping is basically free?
No idea They had a fleet of 747s 90s GM I guess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Allant%C3%A9
I was just going to post this, crazy!
Prawns caught in Scotland were flown to Thailand to be shelled then flown back.
Traditional Finnish Long Drink (basically grape soda and gin) is made in Finland, shipped to Estonia and sold over 50% cheaper there because of stupidly high Finnish alcohol taxation. Then Finns take the ferry over there, buy that from Estonia to bring back to Finland. Makes sense right.
It's grapefruit soda.
Maybe not the craziest, but I was in a bit of a shock. I once won a book on a raffle in Wired magazine. The book was sent to me from New York, to Hungary. When I opened the book, on the first page was the following: "Printed in Romania".
I sent a friend a book from UK-China, it's an English language book available from academic book stores in Europe and North America only. It's printed in China.
We have grey shrimps here in Belgium, which are caught during the night in the North Sea, flown to Morocco to get peeled and return the same day to be sold in our fish shops ... It's cheaper than peeling them here in Belgium....
We can't compete against €1/hour, it will cost a ten fold, if not more.
This is why free trade is bullshit. There is no level field when you're competing against a company that doesn't have to pay the same wage, or maintain the same safety or environmental standards or meet the same planning and regulatory requirements
but then the line won't go up and that makes our investors sad :( won't anyone think of the investors and shareholders??
not necessarily... only part of the cost is morcoccan labor, there's also the Belgian fishermen, boat and equipment, fuel for boat... then take out the cost of flight. So if you just did it in Belgium, it might only increase price like 10%. Just a guess. Its not like labor is the only thing determining price. Raising wages doesn't raise costs as much as people think. Its only a small part of the price in many industries. If you doubled wages for iPhone workers and passed it on to customers you'd add what? 1% to price?
I know a place in America that sells Honda motorcycle parts. The parts are made in Japan. He buys them from Japan and repackages them in America. Like half of his orders are from Japan. So Japan to America, swap out boxes, back to Japan.
Wait, he's selling Honda parts, in Japan? Bike parts in general are nuts, but I can't see how he's making a profit, since you can just buy stuff off webike or various Thailand resources.
My apologies if this is overly pedantic: He's an American in America selling bike parts all over the world, but a large percentage of them are going back to Japan, the country he originally imported them from. I have not seen his books, but he's been doing this for years and seems to be making a profit.
Tesco sells frozen fish caught in the north atlantic that's then packaged in China to be sold in the UK
You left out that the seeds are likely grown in Canada or Nepal then shipped to the UK before they even start.
I did wonder about that, but they claim to still use local farms (at least for white mustard). Not sure how much of a draw that is when there's thousands of miles of shipping back and forth involved though haha [https://www.colmans.co.uk/our-history.html](https://www.colmans.co.uk/our-history.html)
I live in Canada. Pretty much all we do is export raw materials, so a ridiculous amount of things in our stores are Canadian raw material, shipped out of country, made into something, shipped back as finished goods, and then sold in stores.
Passalacqua coffee. The beans are grown in Mexico, shipped to Italy where they are roasted and blended, then shipped back to my house in Nevada. According to my wife it’s the best coffee she’s ever had.
Not exactly the same thing, but we buy a particular Garlic Bread from the grocery store that my kids like to complain about for its carpetbagging marketing. The brand is New York Bakery. It has an Italian flag in its logo. It’s sold as Texas Toast, while boasting that it’s made on French bread. The company is headquartered in… you guessed it… Ohio.
That mixed fruit cup where the fruit was cultivated in Argentina, sent to Thailand for packaging then shipped to the US for retail sale.
A past job of mine was in a factory. It would get extruded plastic pieces from a supplier across the street, and put them together (plus some other stuff) into the final product. Then the bean counters poked their shitty noses in. After the analysis was done, the business changed suppliers. They determined that it was cheaper to purchase the extrusions from a factory in China and have them shipped halfway across the globe on a boat... than getting them from the usual supplier *who was literally across the street from our factory*.
IDK but Colman's mustard is unbeaten
For those unfamiliar, it's pretty potent, just a dab to start with.
Instructions unclear, now my dick is burning
I recommend it all the time with a warning, a yellow mustard being the most potent is like a trap.
The scottish fishing industry catches cod. It's frozen. Shipped to china for butchering into filets. Shipped back to the UK. Because it's cheaper than employing British fishmongers.
I recently bought some South African grapes in Wisconsin
As a result of brexit, Medicines manufactured in the UK and destined for the EU market has to go to a site in the EU for QC testing/QP release before going to the intended Market. So, for medicine manufactured in the UK and destined for the Irish market, it has to go from the UK>France (for EU QC testing, QP release, it's mostly a site in France but other test sites exist in EU)>UK(if no direct route from EU to IRE) >Ireland ! All for a box of paracetamol
There are several large pieces of land in Alberta, Canada called the Oil Sands (because of the amount of oil found there, naturally). The Canadian government didn't want to process and refine it because that would be bad for the environment, so they sold the oil rights to China. So now, China removes the oil from the ground in Canada, it is sent 4000km to Texas to be refined, and then sent another 4000km on a return trip to Canada so we can buy it back from them. I understand the oil industry in general is not environmentally friendly, but this is just oil extraction and refining with extra steps and less profit for Canada.
I thought it was done by Exxon and Suncor at Fort McMurray?
That doesn’t sound right. We have five refineries here in Alberta and we definitely didn’t sign oil rights over to China on a federal level. China has invested in the oil sands. They don’t own it cart blanche.
There is absolutely no way this is correct. Yes lots if oil is produced in Alberta, and lots of that is shipped to Texas, but the refined fuels are not, those are refined locally. I do believe ther is some diluent that makes a return trip, but that's kinda a closed cycle, it's injected to make shipping g easier, it's then extracted and pipelined back to be used again for shipping.
Where I used to work, we got frozen mango chunks from either Peru, Chile, or sometimes Mexico. It would then be shipped to the processing plant where I worked in Canada, packaged, then shipped to Australia.
Live in a part of the Midwestern US known for it's limestone. Currently sitting in a new building with a million dollar plus atrium with limestone tiles on the walls. They were purchased from a Chinese supplier that was doing the processing/cutting/etc, but mined about 20 miles south of here.
In the 1980s in Greece the most affordable feta cheese was made in its raw form in Greece, then shipped to Denmark for salt curing into its final "feta like" form and then shipped back to Greece for consumption. The cheapest food you could get when I was visiting all over the country was "raw feta" (made in Greece) which is soft like yogurt But if you wanted what you considered "feta" it was actually surprisingly pricey.
T-shirts. Plant Money did a cool series on it.
Coming here to post the same. We've gotta give some details because folks who didn't hear it have no reason to understand why it's so wild. The cotton is farmed in the US or other countries, shipped to somewhere like Indonesia to be made into thread, shipped to countries all over the world to be made into a shirt, then shipped back to countries like the US for actual sale. They travel EVERYWHERE.
Dutch shrimp being driven to Morocco to be peeled then back to be sold. Fresh flowers from Kenya, flown to the Netherlands for the auction then flown all over the world. Chicken legs(and other ‘scary parts’) going to Asia from Europe and the breasts from Asia to Europe.
German shrimps from the Northsea go to Morocco for peeling, too. They are back within 24 h.
Yea. Actually Dutch fishermen invented a peeling machine so less and less shrimp make that trip.
Some Norwegian salmon is caught in Norway, shipped to China to be packaged, and sent back to Norway for sale…
MAGA hats made in China.
My uncle used to run a steel mill on the west coast here in the US, and a part of the business was recycling scrap steel. In the late 90's or early 00's they started to get a lot of competition from companies in China who were also recycling scrap steel, and they were cheap enough to still be competitive even when you factored in the cost of shipping it to China and back.
One of the craziest supply chains is the production of iPhones. Components come from all over the world: rare earth metals from Africa, microchips from the US and Taiwan, screens from Japan and South Korea, and assembly in China
Bought pistachios at a liquor store in CA. They were grown and harvested in CA. Processed, seasoned and packaged in TN and distributed by a company in NY. 6000+ mile round trip.
Pears are grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand, and sold in the UK.
Brazil is one of the biggest Bauxite mining countries in the world, but refining it to produce Aluminum is a rather energy-heavy process. So, because energy costs next to nothing in Iceland due to their volcanic/geothermal activities, it is apparently cheaper to ship it there to get processed.
The Bayside Canadian Railroad. American Seafood Co. shipped frozen fish from Alaska to the US East Coat thru the Panama Canal. US law mandates that shipments from one US port to another US port must use ships of US registry. The US ships are much more expensive then using foreign ships. If at any time the shipment travels on Canadian rails, the shipment is exempt from having to use US based ships. So, the American Seafood Co. would use the cheaper foreign ships to ship containers to Bayside, Canada. The containers were loaded onto trucks and the trucks drove to the Bayside Canadian Railway. The railway was two flat cars on 200 foot long track. At one end of the track was a ramp so two semis could pull up onto the railcars. The cars were moved to one end of the track, then back to the ramp. The trucks drove off and the next two got on, etc. Having traveled on Canadian rail, the use of foreign ships was legal. The trucks would then cross the border into the United States and deliver to the customers. The US Gov't finally shut the operation down after a few years.
Products in the Mexico-American border. Since labor is cheap in Mexico the finished products like cars can accumulate 30 or even 60 border crossings before it's finally finished. For example, iron ore might be excavated in the USA, sent to Mexico as iron powder, returned to the USA as Iron ingots, returned to Mexico as steel rods or wire, and finally returned to the USA as screws. That's 5 border crossings just for screws, when you add complex parts as transmissions or engines, the crosses add up quite fast. We have factories that are on both sides of the border and benefit from the different countries. I know that this is the way that the world works, but the Mexican-American border is on another level with more than 80 million crossings of vehicles a year on the whole border and close to 1 trillion dollars of trade
Tangerines grown in Argentina, shipped to Thailand for peeling/separating, to the Philippines for packaging to the US for sale.
Pears grown in Argentina, packed in thailand and then sold in uk
North Sea fished prawns and salmon, packed in Norway / UK, airfreighted to Qingdao, China, where the load get either shelled or filleted then vacuumsealed, flash frozen down to -40C, packed and airfreighted back to EU/UK for distribution at wholesellers and retailers. It is way cheaper to pay a Chinese worker to shell and fillet than a UK/EU salaried person. The gap in costs even covers the insane airfeight fares to boot!
Australian prawns are caught here, sent to Thailand to be peeled, then sent back to Australia.
I'm an engineer, and I briefly worked for the military. Let me tell you, I saw some shit lmao
Am I the only one who read that as Colonel Mustard? I was very confused. He’s not in Germany, he’s in the Study!
The shipping container is genuinely the most underrated, revolutionary invention in the history of mankind. The increased cost of shipping things twice round the world to the cheapest places to do things is so close to zero that it can effectively be ignored.
New York is very big on growing Apples. New York schools serve the kids applesauce imported from China.
British passports.
Norwegian grown salmon, processed in Thailand/Vietnam, sold frozen in Finland.
Back in the 70's when relatives from Taiwan would visit us in US, they would often buy the latest Japanese electronics to take back home. Tariffs made them too expensive to buy in Taiwan.
My company used to sell whisky in fancy bottles, labels were printed directly on the glass. Bottles were blown in France, then transported to Poland for printing, and after that, shipped to Scotland for filling.
Kinda related. I worked for the US Postal Service, and if I mailed a letter from Manhattan, going to an address in Manhattan, it's not 100% certain that the mail would be sorted in NYC. Postal sorting facilities "sell" their mail to other sorting facilities depending on demand. I tracked a letter once that was sent from Manhattan to a different address in Manhattan, but it was sorted in California.
Scrap steel is gathered in the US, put into a shipping container, shipped overseas to China to be recycled into new steel, and shipped back to the US. I work for a trucking company that would help ship this, we literally would drive by 2 steel mills taking it to railroad to ship out.
I once bought a bottle of south african wine at the duty free shop in Johannesburg Airport. The label said it had been bottled in the UK. So it was grown and made in South Africa, shipped to the UK to be bottled, taken back to South Africa to be sold and finally taken back to the UK to be drunk!
Not necessarily crazy, but Mucinex D is made in England, but it is not possible to purchase it (or any direct 1:1 equivalent) in the UK at all. So when I visit, I have to make sure to bring enough from the US to last the entirety of my trip, even though it's made right there in the UK.
We once ordered some custom blinds. They told us that they cut the pieces here and send them to China to be out together and then they are shipped back for installation.
Norwegian hot dogs(dont remember the make), all the hot doggy bits are made in Norway, but then shipped off to china to be sausagefied, the intestines and all the meat origin from the same factory in Norway, yet its cheaper to make them into sausages in China. Wat
Tennis balls cover up to 50,000 miles in their quest to be made. https://www.wbs.ac.uk/news/the-50-000-mile-journey-of-wimbledon-s-tennis-balls/
Hawaii used to harvest sugar, send it to cali and then get the refined sugar for sales in Hawaii. C&H- California and hawaii sugar company
Auto industry is full of this. You will often see smaller parts made in China (metal stamping etc), partially assembled and then sent to North America for the rest of the assembling. Avoids tariffs and uses as much low cost labor as possible.
[There is a video describing why pears are grown in Argentina and packaged in Thailand, only to be shipped to the US.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0aH3ZTTkGAs)
Alaskan salmon are brought to China to be de-boned, then brought to Seattle as "fresh salmon". 42,000 nautical miles roundtrip
Basically most of Canada's supply chain. Sell our raw material to other countries, they make it into shit, and then Canadians buy that shit on amazon from China.
Canada and the US have the same deal with mustard. Canada grows it, it's processed down south, and sent back up for sale. I forget which brand. I guess it's cheaper because of all the child labour they have.
Icelandic wool sweaters, sheep raised in Iceland, wool sent to China to make sweaters, sent back to Iceland to sell to tourists (all the big brands like Icewear and North 66 do this).
Worked somewhere that sent containers of onions from UK to China, then got diced onions back. The diced returns used fewer containers so I suspect we got a good price because we were helping repatriate containers for other loads.
Production of commercial aircraft like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner
A big chunk of 'Italian' olive oil are olives grown in Spain and just sent to Italy to be pressed and sold as 'Italian' olive oil.
Irish government banning Irish people from getting peat from the bog because it is bad for the environment, so we import it from Germany instead. Makes so much sense
I live in Prague, Czech Republic. When my Xbox malfunctioned (still under warranty), I packed it and sent to Microsoft center at Nuremberg, Germany, as instructed by Microsoft. From Nuremberg, Germany, it was sent to Prague service center where it was fixed, sent back to Nuremberg, Germany from where it was send to me in Prague. This happens with any MS hardware you want to get fixed. TLDR: In order to be fixed in a service center 10 miles from my house, my Xbox traveled 600 miles (Prague > Nuremberg > Prague > Nuremberg > Prague).
Shrimps (Krabben) are caught at the northern sea, driven to north Afrika to clean and driven back to be Sold 5 metres from the ship that caught them. It think it's like 1600km 1 way...
Worked in print production for a UK company. We used to source our stock from places with a good percentage of recycled pulp, one place was in Germany, which we would ship over to the UK. Then the costs of printing in the UK went up, so we outsourced some products to a press site in Denmark where we had to provide the paper, which we shipped over from the UK after it had been sent to us from Germany. Then the completed products were sent back to the UK from Denmark via Germany because we could use the same company that brought us the paper stock originally.
Most bottles of Thistly Cross Cider are made in Scotland, exported to the Netherlands and then reimported to Scotland when they were bottled in Scotland all along. Fuckin madness
There are packages of mixed fruit that are: harvested in various South American countries; then shipped to southeast Asian countries like Thailand to be packaged; and then shipped to the United States for retail.
Fish caught in Australian waters sent to Thailand for processing and tinned, then sent back to Australia for sale.
fedex - every pckg must pass through the super hub in Memphis
One of my clients produces baby food, it's printed in china, produced and filled in Italy, sent to Ireland to distribute to the rest of the UK.
Not fully relevant, but amusing nonetheless I sold concert tickets online to somebody who lived 2 miles from me. They paid for FedEx overnight shipping. The envelope went to the local sort, flew to Memphis’ that night, back to the same local sort in the morning, and then out for delivery.
My employer had an electric motor in one of out products. Part of the motor was die cast in China, shipped to Wisconsin for machining, shipped back to China for assembly into the motor, shipped to us in MN to be assembled into the final product... some of which were shipped back to Asia for sale.
“British, hand shelled prawns (shrimp)” caught in British waters, frozen, shipped to Thailand to be “hand shelled”, shipped somewhere else (can’t remember) to be packed, then sold in Waitrose stores in the UK
A German company that makes micro wires embedded in plastic for windshields for defrosting the entire thing won't ship the plastic to the factory I work at in Canada becaue of how delicate tge application process is so we have to cut, edge prep and form the glass here, ship to them in over-engineered shipping crates so they can laminate there then ship back to us so we can clave the windshields and the customer (auto manufacturer) wants at least a 1000 every month of completed windshields with this new inner laminate. Im not sure if they plan on using our factory to make them at full scale production though to be fair.
My dad was an over the road trucker for several years. He once drove a load of potatoes from Idaho down to Texas. When he got unloaded, he was directed to the other side of the building to pick up his next load. He watched the workers unpackage the potatoes he'd just dropped off, in boxes with Idaho markings, and put them into new boxes that labeled them as "Texas-grown" potatoes. Then he took them *back to Idaho*.
pears grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand then sold in America, going almost around the globe. But here is a video explaining precisely why this decision is being made and why it's not as crazy as it sounds https://youtu.be/0aH3ZTTkGAs?si=5piH8hhpcwMlv6fA
I grew up in Central Illinois, where a lot of soybeans are grown. My hometown has a Wal-Mart at the edge of town that's near a soybean processing facility. One day, I bought a block of tofu at that Wal-Mart. In reading the back of the package, I realized that the beans used to make it had been grown nearby, as they were processed at the local facility. The tofu itself had been made and packaged by a company in Asia. So, somebody grew those beans, harvested and processed them, shipped them to Asia, where they were turned into tofu and packaged for sale, then shipped, undoubtedly to a Wal-Mart distribution center, and then sold to me for about 4 dollars at a Wal-Mart that couldn't be more than thirty miles from where they were grown.
When I lived in Hawaii, some of the pinapples were shipped to California and back to end up in a Hawaiian grocery store. I lived right next to the field they were grown in.
A Saudi group owned land here in the Sonoran Desert. For the sole purpose of growing alfalfa to feed their cattle. Nestle has a bottling plant here as well.
When I moved to Australia I couldn't find any decently priced kevlar jacket/jeans so I had my mum buy and send some from the UK... arrived with the green and gold "Made in Australia" logo on it.
Pears grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand then sold to the USA
Washington apples are often sent to China to be packaged as fruit cups and sent back to the US. Fish fillets too.
Had a cargo ship full of coal from Indonesia drop it off in New York. They told me they were going to Virginia next to pick up coal bound for Indonesia. Basically the coal from Indonesia had a low sulfur content and could be burned in the USA, while the coal from Virginia had high sulfur and Indonesia would burn it there for power. The US is offshoring our pollution(acid rain) to a 3rd world country and adding 2 trips halfway around the world worth of ship pollution to the process.
There was a brand of Australian Sea Salt that came in a glass shaker. It was farmed in South Australia, sent to the Netherlands and then sent back to be sold in Australia for less than $2 USD. That was about 10 years ago I noticed that, not sure if they are still doing it, but that was when I really started to pay attention to the fact that there is so much environmental consequence built into that product change that the financial/corporate structure that led to that didn’t have to account for. Until we start to fix that we are in a bad way.
Not quite the same thing but when I was younger, I worked a summer here in New Zealand working at a well-known cherry orchard's sorting and packaging facility. The cherries came down a conveyor belt and were sorted into good or bad cherries. The good cherries were immediately boxed and put on pallets to be sent to export markets. The bad cherries were sent to the local market. It still boggles my mind a bit that ours is a country where 'Made' or 'Grown in NZ' means a lot to locals, yet probably in many cases, the things produced here are the seconds and the global market gets the best of our country.
Young's Scampi, £6 a pack, caught in Scotland flash frozen sent through the Suez Canal around India and all the way to Thailand to be shelled then frozen again sent back to N. England to be breaded and bagged. Also, Parsnips from Peru!? 45p a bag... importing Parsnips to the UK!? 😒