90% of everything: the sea freight facts hiding in plain sight

Earlier this month, we shared one of those shipping facts on LinkedIn that makes you look around the room a little differently: around 90% of everything we own has travelled by sea.

It clearly struck a chord. So, as promised, here is the longer version – because behind that one statistic sits one of the world’s biggest but least noticed industries, moving the things we use every day.

Is it really 90%?

The 90% figure was made famous by journalist Rose George’s book Ninety Percent of Everything. If we are being precise, UN Trade and Development puts the proportion at around 80% of international trade in goods by volume.

Measure it by weight, value or distance and the answer changes slightly. But the main point stands: most of the world’s physical trade moves by ship.

The quantities involved are difficult to picture. In 2024, global seaborne trade reached around 12.7 billion tonnes. Spread that across the world’s population and it works out at more than one and a half tonnes of cargo for every person on the planet – roughly the weight of a small car, per person, every year.

For the UK, the reliance on shipping is even more obvious. As an island nation, around 95% of our imports and exports pass through our ports. In 2025, UK ports handled 428.3 million tonnes of international and domestic freight.

The tea, the trainers, the timber and the tractor parts may take very different routes, but most of them will have been on a ship before they reached a warehouse, shop or doorstep.

Now for the containers

Container shipping is where the scale becomes particularly impressive. According to the World Shipping Council, there were around 280 million container movements worldwide in 2025.

Each box may look much like the next from the outside, but inside could be anything from car parts and coffee machines to clothes, chemicals or an entire factory production line.

Then there are the ships carrying them. The MSC Irina class currently holds the record for container capacity, with space for the equivalent of 24,346 standard 20-foot containers. At almost 400 metres long, MSC Irina is about 90 metres longer than the Shard is tall.

Put its full capacity of 20-foot containers end to end and the line would stretch for roughly 90 miles – from London to Brighton and most of the way back again.

If you are wondering what actually fits inside the different types of container, we have a useful guide to container specifications.

Containers can have remarkable second lives, too. Container Love follows a decommissioned container on its journey to becoming a business lab for students at Mukwashi Trust School in Zambia – a project we are very proud to support.

What actually happens to one container?

Let’s follow a fairly ordinary shipment.

A factory in Shanghai finishes an order of garden furniture for a retailer in Leeds. A freight forwarder books space on a suitable sailing and arranges for an empty container to be collected from a depot.

The furniture is packed inside and the doors are sealed. In shipping, this is called “stuffing” the container, which is not the industry’s most glamorous piece of terminology, but it does the job.

The container travels to the port, where the export formalities are completed. It then joins hundreds or thousands of other boxes in the terminal until its vessel is ready.

Loading one of these ships is a considerable planning exercise. Heavy containers generally need to sit lower down, refrigerated containers need access to power and hazardous goods have strict rules about where they can be placed. The order in which the ship will visit its ports matters too – nobody wants to unload half a vessel to reach the boxes meant to come off first.

After several weeks at sea, our garden furniture arrives at Felixstowe, London Gateway or Southampton. Once the UK import formalities are complete, the container is collected and taken north by road or rail. The retailer unloads it, the empty box returns to the container pool and, before long, another business is waiting to use it.

Alongside the physical container travels a second shipment made entirely of information: the bill of lading, customs declarations, packing lists, invoices and any certificates or permits the goods require.

When everything is correct, the journey can look remarkably simple. Making it look simple is a large part of what a freight forwarder does.

Your fruit bowl has travelled further than you think

Take the banana sitting on the kitchen side. It was probably picked while still green somewhere in Latin America, placed inside a refrigerated container and kept at a carefully controlled temperature for its Atlantic crossing. Final ripening usually happens after it reaches the UK, ready for it to arrive in the supermarket at just the right moment.

Your morning coffee may have sailed from Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia or East Africa. Tea may have come from Kenya, India or Sri Lanka. The cotton in your clothes, the components in your phone and the machinery used to make both have probably crossed at least one ocean.

Shipping is one of the reasons a pineapple grown thousands of miles away can cost less than the coffee you drink with it. Once you begin noticing these journeys, the weekly shop starts to look rather like a world atlas.

That choice is remarkable, but distance still has a footprint. This is not an argument for giving up bananas or coffee, or pretending global trade can simply stop. It is just a reason to think twice – choose local or seasonal when there is a sensible option, and when something really does need to travel halfway around the world, make sure the journey is managed as efficiently as possible.

The people keeping everything moving

None of this happens automatically.

The International Chamber of Shipping estimates that nearly 1.9 million seafarers work aboard internationally trading merchant ships.

Then there are the port crews, terminal planners, crane drivers, hauliers, customs officers, warehouse teams and freight forwarders. Even the most ordinary parcel has passed through a surprisingly long chain of human hands.

Freight forwarding may involve increasingly clever technology, but it is still human at heart. Behind every smooth delivery is someone checking the details, watching the timings and sorting out small problems before they turn into expensive ones.

Often while drinking a cup of coffee that also arrived by sea.

Three useful things to know if you ship by sea

The calendar matters. Space becomes tighter before Chinese New Year and during the build-up to Christmas. Booking early gives you more choice and far less chance of an unwelcome surprise.

You do not need enough cargo to fill a whole container. With less-than-container-load shipping, usually shortened to LCL and also known as groupage, your goods share a container with other shipments travelling in the same direction.

Port-to-port is not the same as door-to-door. A sailing time tells you how long the vessel is expected to spend between ports. It does not include collection, terminal handling, customs clearance, unloading or final delivery. Those parts need planning too.

And what about the carbon?

All that movement has a carbon cost. The International Maritime Organization’s most recent full global study found that shipping produced around 2.9% of global human-made greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 – usually rounded to 3%.

There is some important context. For each tonne of freight moved over a long distance, sea freight is generally far less carbon-intensive than air or road. That does not make it carbon-free, but choosing sea rather than air when time allows can make a substantial difference.

The ships themselves are changing too. At the beginning of 2026, 47% of the global ship orderbook by tonnage was designed for alternative fuels.

That is encouraging, but it needs a little perspective. “Alternative fuel” covers several very different options, including LNG and methanol, and does not automatically mean zero emissions. The fuels must also be available in sufficient quantities at the right ports. And because working ships can remain in service for decades, replacing the current fleet will take time.

This is why we do not treat offsetting as the starting point. The order matters: avoid emissions where possible, reduce what cannot be avoided and only then take responsibility for what remains. We explored this in more detail in The offset myth: why reduction comes before removal.

At Green Leaves Logistics, that approach includes digitised shipping documents, EV first and last-mile courier transport in the UK and biofuels wherever possible.

Our carbon management service then monitors, reports and responsibly offsets unavoidable emissions, taking enough action to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than the shipment emits.

Through MyGL, customers can see their shipments, documents and estimated emissions information in one place and produce reports whenever they need them.

The next parcel on your doorstep

That is what sits behind the 90% statistic: ships, containers, ports, paperwork and millions of people, all working together to move the things the world needs.

Most of the time, it happens so smoothly that nobody gives the journey a second thought.

Next time a parcel arrives, have a look at where it was made. Its final trip to your door may have been short, but the journey before it probably was not.

And if your business has a journey of its own to plan – whether it is your first container or your five-hundredth – get in touch with the Green Leaves Logistics team. We will look after the route, the paperwork, the handovers and the carbon while you get on with everything else.