Precisely 5 minutes after the homeowner leaves  for work in the morning, a package is gently  

delivered to their doorstep containing an  impulse purchase from the night before.  

This box is just one of 36 million that will be  delivered across America over the next 10 hours,  

serving a growing appetite for home delivered  consumption. But inside this particular package  

is a humble paper shredder purchased for $59.99  with free delivery. As far as modern products go,  

it's actually pretty basic. It only has 40  components in total, and they are each made from  

common generic materials. But even to assemble  this cheap desktop appliance, those simple parts  

collectively traveled over half a million km,  went through hundreds of industrial facilities  

in dozens of countries, employed thousands  of workers, and it all started right here.

In the Northern Territory of Australia, the  Alcan Gove mine extracts 12.5 million tons  

of bauxite every year. Australia is the largest  producer of this raw material in the world. And  

this mine is one of its biggest. The operation  is simultaneously so remote and massive that  

it's actually the fourth largest township in  a region roughly twice the size of France.  

This is particularly impressive since the  permanent population of the outpost is actually  

less than a few hundred people. Almost everybody  here at a given time flies in to work at this mine  

and then flies out back to civilization once their  roster is complete. And if you think that sounds  

a little bit Avataresque, well, the main street  is called Pandora, and their wildlife is probably  

just as deadly. Anyway, the mining process that  takes place here is almost astonishingly simple.  

Most of the material that they're after is  literally sitting on the surface. So instead  

of drilling deep into the earth, they just blow  up the dirt and scoop it into giant trucks.  

This crude technique is highly effective and  economical. But it does have one unintended side  

effect since everything happens at the surface.  The red dirt of this sprawling extraction sites  

are easily visible from space. Either way, once  it's collected, the raw material is moved along  

an 18 km conveyor belt to a processing and storage  yard at the very tip of the peninsula where the  

aluminina ore is separated from other impurities.  It's kept here until a buyer sends a bulk carrier  

to dock at the mine's dedicated shipping port,  and then it's back on another conveyor belt to  

a ship waiting almost a mile offshore. The  vessels moving this material are some of the  

largest bulk freighters in the world. They're so  large that they can't actually get that close to  

shore without a dedicated deep water port, and  those are expensive. The port only handles two  

particular products in bulk. Ships take out  raw aluminina and bring in heavy fuel oil,  

which is used in a self-contained electrical  plant to power both the industrial mine site  

and the local township. Both raw ore and liquid  fuel can be piped or moved on a conveyor. So,  

it's easier to get the cargo out across the ocean  to the ship than to bring the ship to the cargo  

at the shallow shore. Once loaded, this glorified  pile of dirt will start a 3-w weekek journey up  

the Malaca Strait through the Indian Ocean, the  Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean to end up here  

on almost exactly the opposite side of the planet  in Iceland. This small country is blessed with  

almost unlimited geothermal power, which makes the  energyintensive process of turning raw aluminum  

into refined aluminium very coste effective and  environmentally friendly compared to alternative  

plants that power their operations with fossil  fuels. Thousands of tons of raw aluminum  

oxide is loaded into massive furnaces and then  electrolytically separated into pure aluminium.  

If you ever did an electrolysis experiment in  science class, separating out hydrogen and oxygen,  

the process is almost the same. Only it's done  with molten metal instead of water, and the energy  

requirements are an order of magnitude greater. To  refine just 1 ton of aluminium takes approximately  

15 megawatt hours of electricity. To put that  into perspective, that would be enough energy  

to drive a standard Tesla Model 3 over 60,000  m or 100,000 km. This plant, on the other hand,  

smelts more than a thousand tons every day. The  reason it's worth it to ship this raw material  

halfway across the world is because the energy  savings of refining aluminium in Iceland with its  

cheap electricity pay for the increased shipping  costs more than 10 times over. Once this process  

is completed, the molten aluminium is poured into  ingot molds and then stacked into pallets, which  

can then be loaded back onto the same kind of bulk  carrier that delivered the raw materials in the  

first place. Normally, these ships are loaded with  loose dry goods, but they're effectively just big  

floating boxes. If they can safely store something  in their holds, they can ship it. From there, the  

next destination back through the Mediterranean  and the Suez is up to the Chinese city of Fen.  

This industrial city center across the bay from  Hong Kong and Shenzhen has become a trade hub for  

raw materials like copper, steel, and aluminium.  Vendors like Henan Aluminium Industrial Company  

will buy these ingots directly from smelting  plants and then ship them to their warehouses  

across the river. These businesses then wholesale  these raw ingots, but also turn them into alloid  

sheets and plates to be sold at a slight markup  to industrial customers throughout southern China.  

A lot of these products are sold through existing  contact networks, but if you're inclined to buy  

industrial quantities of metal, they also post  their wares on sites like Alibaba, although you  

do need to buy 5 tons at a time, so it should last  you a while. The 6061 grade aluminium alloy from  

Iceland can actually charge a slight premium over  regular sheets because certain suppliers prefer  

the European manufacturer's quality control  and green manufacturing process. Of course,  

most manufacturers simply don't care as long as  the material gets the job done, so the marketplace  

between vendors and buyers is fierce. However,  once a deal is made, 30 tons of cylindrical alloy  

beams are loaded onto a barge and floated another  thousand km up the Pearl River to a machining  

plant just on the outskirts of the city of Nan  Ning. It's probably a city you've never heard of,  

but it's home to nearly 9 million people and  is a major producer of the parts that make the  

parts that make the products you interact with  every day. Once the beams are unloaded into the  

factory warehouse, they're loaded into grinding  machines to etch out a basic spoke pattern, and  

then they're sliced lengthwise to produce hundreds  of basic standardized gears. Mechanical parts made  

out of aluminium are not nearly as strong as  those made out of steel, but the lighter weight  

and easier machinability of this metal makes it  very popular for low stress applications in basic  

consumer machines. Once they're machined, the  pallets of gears are then shipped back down the  

river to another buyer who ordered the parts in  bulk a month before. At this point, the one ton  

of raw bark site scraped out of the ground back in  Australia has been turned into 5,000 little metal  

gears. The net's material hasn't actually changed  that much, apart from a few trace metals thrown in  

to form an alloy. However, as unrefined ore, it  would sell in China for around $75 a ton. These  

basic gears, on the other hand, are now going  to be sold in exactly the same city for $5,000,  

a markup of 600%, which is so far justified every  step in the process. But it's not done yet. These  

gears are actually being forwarded from Guanhol  to another buyer in Vietnam. They're loaded onto  

a 20ft shipping container and then into a small  cargo ship which will make the short 2-day journey  

from the ocean gate shipping terminal, no not that  ocean gate to the port city of Hyong. Over time,  

as China has developed, it's actually started  outsourcing a lot of its basic manufacturing  

the same way that the West has outsourced their  basic manufacturing to China. Chinese workers  

and businesses have developed an array of highly  technical industrial skills and expertise. Cities  

like Goanzhou are also not cheap to operate in  anymore and workers in these cities demand wages  

enough to compensate for this cost of living.  What this means is that basic hand assembly is  

far more economical in Vietnam than it is back  in China. Major manufacturers like LG, Samsung,  

Bridgestone, Yazaki, and Foxcon all have massive  manufacturing plants in this city because it's one  

of the most competitive places in the world to  put stuff together. It's still close to China,  

so technical pieces can be imported and assembled  components can be exported with very few barriers,  

while line workers here simply earn about one  fifth of what similar Chinese workers would  

make a few thousand m up north. In this case, the  gears end up in a smaller factory that specializes  

in low-end consumer hardware. Here the gears  are attached by hand to an electrical motor  

which is then combined with lower stress plastic  gears, a rubber belt, a stack of steel teeth,  

all held together by an injection molded plastic  case. None of these components were made in this  

factory just being put together here. In fact,  each and every one of them have all taken a  

similar journey from raw material extraction to  refineries, machining, component manufacturing,  

and assembly in addition to all the  warehousing and shipping that comes with it.  

But the journey is still not over yet. The  technical components have all been assembled,  

but that package back on the doorstep in America  didn't contain an EC43515 MCD P4 crosscut electric  

shredder sub-asssembly. It contained a user-ready  paper shredder. Most manufacturers don't want to  

deal with the stress and persnickety requests that  come from retail clients. So once this housing  

is assembled, it's shipped back to China to a  warehouse that produces white labelled consumer  

products for several retailers across the world.  These generic internals will eventually be used in  

several different models of paper shredder, some  of which will cost significantly more than others.  

The way it works is that a retailer from a country  like America will design a plastic housing to go  

around the internal components and then sell their  model to end users. In this case, the American  

retailer will work with the Chinese wholesaler  to pick some injection molded shapes and colors  

which they think will work with their branding  to best appeal to their target consumers in their  

home market. The Chinese factory produces large  batches of these models for a fixed price and  

will also work with other suppliers on packaging.  Additionally, a printed cardboard box and foam  

insulation is provided by a supplier in Thailand,  and everything is put together and loaded onto  

specially compliant pallets, which are then  placed into a 40ft shipping container. From there,  

the Chinese wholesaler and the American retailer  use a third-party customs broker who specializes  

in booking slots on container ships and making  sure everything gets through customs at each end  

with minimal headaches. Since the boxes containing  the paper shredders are not particularly large,  

heavy, or dangerous, they can be forwarded  straight from the port in Los Angeles to the  

Amazon inbound cross dock a few miles up the road.  Trucks constantly drive this route 24 hours a day,  

taking containers from the dock side to this  distribution warehouse in a process called dryage.  

From this, the containers are unpacked and  individual products are then organized and sent  

out across the country to strategically placed  fulfillment centers where they'll await a midnight  

impulse purchase. This whole process was just  one single branch of a very small basic product  

tree. Tracing the origin of every component  in this shredder would literally take hours,  

and that's to say nothing, of goods with thousands  of far more technical parts. Even this cheap basic  

appliance, which will statistically only be  used about 12 times before being disposed of,  

traveled many times around the world because  that's the cheapest way to do things. Australia  

has resources. Iceland has practically unlimited  energy. China has an unrivaled industrial network.  

Vietnam has a large cheap workforce. And the USA  has insatiable consumers. It's up to you to decide  

if you think this web of comparative advantage  has really made the world a better place.  

But what it has done is made things cheaper and  more convenient. Today, a paper shredder is an  

impulse purchase, but just 50 years ago,  an electronic device like this would have  

been a family heirloom. If there's one invention  above all of that which has made this possible,  

it's the humble box. Most of these parts have  been fed around in along the way. So, if you liked  

this video, go and check out the next one on the  incredible life of the humble shipping container.