ROCKPORT – Retired shipping executive Bill Hagenzieker is trying to get his former colleagues to think outside the box – literally.

Hagenzieker believes he has developed a system that, if implemented, would represent a major leap forward in the way goods are transported from factory to port to ship, and then, at the other end, from ship to port to truck. While it wouldn’t spell the end of shipping containers – the large boxes that go from ship’s deck to truck chassis – it would radically change their role.

But to understand what Hagenzieker proposes, a little history is in order.

From the time ancient mariners first sailed from one place to another in boats laden with goods to the 1950s there were few changes in the way cargo was handled.

Before World War II, cargo was stowed – in bulk, or in small crates – in a ship’s hold, often loaded by booms from which nets dangled.

All that changed when Malcolm McLean, a trucking company owner from North Carolina, hit upon the idea of building a box that could be stacked on a ship, and then set on a truck’s trailer, drastically reducing the time between the arrival of a ship in port and delivery of goods to market.

Key to that development was that McLean thought about shipping containers not as a part of a ship, but rather as the top of a truck.

The birth of the shipping container in the 1950s revolutionized the business of moving cargo, Hagenzieker said during a recent interview. A native of the Netherlands, the 77-year-old has seen it all in his years of working as a merchant mariner, a stevedore, and finally as an executive in the shipping business.

Though he has retired to Rockport, Hagenzieker believes that in this age of global markets and fear of terrorism, the time may have come for a better mouse trap – a shipping container that melds the old way of loading goods with the newer container method.

Rob Elder, director of the office of freight for the state Department of Transportation, has met several times with Hagenzieker about his proposal.

“I think it has merit,” Elder said of the idea. “It means sort of a revolution in the way things are done,” but he agrees with Hagenzieker that “there is a real problem with containers.”

Topping the list of reasons to support the container sled method, Elder said, is that it would eliminate the 5-1 ratio of empty containers to revenue-producing containers in the current system. He also likes the improved security Hagenzieker’s plan offers.

Trade journals have written favorably about the container sled proposal, Elder added.

In 1953, at the age of 27, Hagenzieker left Europe after graduating from his native country’s merchant marine academy. His father had been in the steamship business, and it seemed natural to follow in the family trade.

With the ability to speak English well, Hagenzieker eventually landed in the United States, and worked for a time on a shrimp boat out of Key West, Fla. He then boarded a bus for San Francisco, where he worked until he got sick of shipping.

He was employed by a pharmaceutical firm for a while and joked that at one point he fantasized about walking inland with an oar in one hand until he found a town where no one knew what it was. But, as often happens, Hagenzieker was drawn back to where he began, in the shipping business, getting an offer to work as a stevedore in New York.

Eventually, he became superintendent on a pier, working for International Terminal Operators. Years later, in 1968, he was named president of Universal Terminal Stevedoring of California, a new offshoot of a New York firm, and was given a chance to return to San Francisco to develop the West Coast market.

His jobs gave Hagenzieker a front-row seat during the revolution in shipping that took place in the post-World War II years. And the dynamics at work at the beginning of his career – the need to get a product packed safely, but then moved quickly from port to ship to port to market – are still the driving forces today, he said.

One of the first links in the container chain of evolution developed during World War II when the military began shipping goods and equipment in wooden boxes that measured 8 feet square.

If a crate could be pre-packed, it could limit the time a ship had to spend in port. Until that time, ships generally spent as much time in port as they did at sea, Hagenzieker said.

Not long after the war, McLean hit upon the idea of building a container that could be stacked in the hold or on the deck of a ship, then lifted off and set atop the chassis of a tractor-trailer.

“It just made a lot of sense,” Hagenzieker said of the system.

In the early days, McLean shipped containers from Newark, N.J., to Houston, then on a regular run from Newark to San Juan, Puerto Rico. When McLean – who died just last year at 87 – began shipping containers to Europe in 1966, Hagenzieker said, the Old World shipping magnates – who had dismissed McLean’s efforts as inappropriate for crossing oceans – suddenly were very worried.

Quickly, the containers became the preferred shipping method, and dimensions were standardized at 40 feet long, by 8 feet wide and 8 feet high. There are now more than 200 million such containers – about 5 sets per shipper – in use around the world. In addition to being carried by trucks, they can also be hauled by trains.

Hagenzieker said with four cranes operating, 25 containers can be loaded or unloaded from a ship per hour.

But one drawback of conventional containers is that they may sit at factory loading docks for days, as manufacturers produce goods to fill them. And with so many sets of containers needed to keep cargo moving, the cost mounts up, as do the logistics of tracking them.

And in the post-Sept. 11 world, any one of those 200 million containers could be used by terrorists smuggling weapons or biological agents.

Thinking about the problem, Hagenzieker devised what he thinks is a simple, but better way. His container sled system keeps the containers on ships and in ports, not on the roads and railways.

Picture a flat, steel-frame platform onto which steel mesh or plywood side panels could be added, though sides are not necessary. This frame is what Hagenzieker has dubbed the “container sled.” Trucks would back up to the loading dock at a specially designed port warehouse facility where its contents could be unloaded and stacked onto a sled.

The sled would then be moved into the storage facility, where it could be stacked with other loaded sleds, using a heavy-duty hydraulic jack system. A cut-away drawing of what Hagenzieker proposes for the portside storage facility looks like dozens of shoeboxes on shelves. The storage facility could be as high as four or five floors.

When a ship arrives for the cargo, the appropriate sleds would be brought down to the dock, and slid into a standard container that has been lifted off the ship. The container is then loaded the conventional way back onto the ship. The sled stays with the container box until it is unloaded at the destination port, then it is slid out and the goods reloaded onto trucks, railroad cars or barges.

Hagenzieker admitted that the process seemed more labor intensive with workers having to load and unload trucks by hand on the “land side” of the facility – he estimates the need for about 8,500 new jobs nationwide – but that savings through his system would more than offset that cost, he said.

It would not be difficult, Hagenzieker believes, to slide an X-ray or other scanning device over a sled each time it is moved into or out of the stacking facility, thereby preventing smuggling of weapons.

Instead of paying about $6,500 for a container, a sled can be purchased for $2,000 to $3,000. And the sled system would eliminate the need for 80 percent of containers, Hagenzieker projects.

He envisions the sleds being moved along docks by very large pallet jacks – the devices that are used in warehouses to lift pallets loaded with goods. The jack slides under the load, and with hydraulics, allows one or two people to lift it just inches off the floor and steer it from one location to another.

Hagenzieker believes his system would save U.S. businesses $17 billion annually.

To market and sell his system, Hagenzieker has formed Coastwise, Inc.