BBC turns shipper to promote The Box

The British Broadcasting Corp., usually more interested in television boxes than shipping containers, today waved goodbye to a BBC-branded 40-foot box at the Port of Southampton, which it will track during a yearlong voyage across the world.

A joint collaboration between the BBC and Container Shipping Information Service (CSIS), The Box project aims to give an insight into the world of container shipping by interactively tracking the progress of the container online through daily GPS tracking updates and through information available via the www.bbc.co.uk/thebox and www.shipsandboxes.com Web sites.

The BBC's container will first travel from Southampton to Scotland to be loaded with whisky and then put onto a containership bound for China with a scheduled return to the United Kingdom next summer.

Imagine your house without anything in it, not even the paint on the walls, and you will start to see how much our lives have been positively impacted by the benefits of container shipping, said Jeremy Nixon, European managing director of Japan's NYK Line, a CSIS member.

As this specific container travels around the world everyone can follow its adventures and start to understand how pivotal container shipping is to the globalized world and the global economy. We want people to think about where the things that they buy come from and how they get from where they are produced to where they are consumed. We are absolutely thrilled to be part of this important initiative.