Our guide to empty container return and avoiding detention covers a narrower, more urgent problem: the box is empty, you are ready to hand it back, and the terminal will not take it, with per diem clocking up while you wait. This post is about the layer underneath that. Before a container ever reaches your dock, someone owns it, someone decided it would be in that city rather than another, and someone will decide how it gets back into circulation. That is the commercial side of container supply: who leases the boxes, why a one-way lease exists at all, why some ports end up swimming in empties while others run short, and why reusing an import box for an export load without sending it back to the depot first, a street turn, is worth understanding even though it will not solve a detention dispute you are already in.
Who actually owns the container you are shipping in
Ocean carriers own very large container fleets of their own, but a substantial share of the world's boxes belong to independent leasing companies that lease them back to carriers, NVOCCs and forwarders rather than operating any ships. The clearest public figure on how that split has moved comes from the shipping analyst Drewry: its 2018 Container Census found that leasing companies owned nearly 52 percent of the global container fleet, up from a minority share a decade earlier, and projected the lessor share would reach 54 percent by 2020. Drewry's more recent census editions sit behind a paid subscription, so a precise current figure is not publicly verifiable as of October 2026, but the direction has not reversed: the sector has kept consolidating since, including Textainer's completion of its acquisition of Seaco on 16 December 2025, which Textainer's own announcement describes as creating "the world's largest and most diversified container fleet" at roughly 8.3 million CEU (cost equivalent units, a measure that weights different container types rather than counting boxes evenly).
A handful of named lessors do most of this business. Triton International describes itself on its own site as the world's largest intermodal container leasing company by TEU, with more than 7 million TEU in its owned and managed fleet and "1 in 6 containers in the world" carrying its mark. Textainer, now combined with Seaco, leads on the CEU measure instead. CAI, part of Japan's Mitsubishi HC Capital group since 2021, describes itself as the world's fourth largest container leasing company with a fleet of over 4 million TEU, serving "shipping lines, container operators, and logistics providers" directly. Hong Kong based Florens, the wholly owned leasing arm of COSCO Shipping, is another long-established name in the same tier. None of these companies operate a single vessel; their business is owning boxes and renting them out, which is exactly why a forwarder with no ships of its own can still put a container somewhere a carrier's own fleet is thin.
What a one-way lease is, and why it exists
A standard container lease is a round trip: you pick a box up at one depot and are expected to return it, eventually, to a depot in the same network. A one-way lease breaks that symmetry on purpose. Triton's own description of the product calls it "a short-term lease from point to point," picked up at one of its depots and redelivered at a different one, more than 400 of which it operates worldwide, with no obligation to bring the box back to where it started. Seaco markets the same idea under "One-Way Moves" and is explicit about who it is for: freight forwarders, NVOCCs and shipping companies, not only the carriers that own the bulk of the world's tonnage.
The reason this product exists at all is capacity location, not capacity volume. A carrier or forwarder that needs equipment in an import-heavy city, where empties are already piling up, has no real shortage problem there. The shortage shows up on the other side of an imbalanced lane, in an export-heavy location running short of boxes to load. A one-way lease lets a lessee collect a container where it is needed and drop it somewhere else in the lessor's network, and Triton's own page on the product notes that "in some trade lanes, we may be able to offer incentives for one-way leasing," which is the lessor's own way of nudging equipment toward a location it would otherwise have to reposition at its own cost. The lessee typically still pays the usual leasing and movement charges either way; what changes is that the lessor, not the lessee, absorbs the job of eventually getting the box back into round-trip service.
The imbalance problem underneath all of this
None of this one-way leasing or incentive activity exists without a real, persistent structural problem: trade is not symmetric, so containers are not symmetric either. A region that imports far more than it exports accumulates empty boxes after they are unloaded; a region that exports far more than it imports runs short of boxes to fill. Industry analyst Sea-Intelligence's tracking, reported by trade publication The Loadstar in March 2026, found that empty containers had risen from about 22 percent of loaded container volumes before the pandemic to roughly 28 percent by January 2026, with Asia to Europe routes singled out as particularly affected, and Rotterdam's own director of containers, Hanna Stelzel, confirming that "we do see that there's a growing number of empty containers that's being repositioned." That repositioning is not free: every empty move still costs a slot, a lift and a sailing, without a paying customer behind it, which is the direct commercial reason leasing companies built a product specifically to reduce how many empty moves they have to fund.
This is also why the fee structure around a one-way lease or a location specific drop-off tends to track the imbalance itself rather than a flat national or regional rate. A depot that already has more boxes than it needs is an easy, often incentivised place to drop one off; a depot that is short of equipment is where a lessor would rather you returned one, not left one somewhere else. If you are quoting a move that will leave a leased box at an unfamiliar destination, ask the lessor directly whether that specific depot is a surplus or deficit location before assuming the standard rate applies.
What a street turn actually is
A street turn is a different mechanism entirely, and it does not involve leasing a new box at all. It means taking a container that has just been emptied at an importer's dock and loading it straight onto an exporter's outbound shipment, without first trucking it back to the carrier's container yard or rail ramp. The container itself is usually still the carrier's own asset, moving under the original ocean bill of lading, not a leased or shipper owned box; the street turn is about reusing that specific container's remaining dwell time rather than about who owns it.
The appeal is straightforward. Skipping the empty return trip and the later empty pickup trip saves a drayage move for the trucker, cuts the number of days a detention clock would otherwise be running, and saves the carrier a repositioning move of its own, since the box goes straight back out full instead of sitting at a depot waiting for the next outbound load. But the container is still the carrier's asset under the bill of lading, which is exactly why a street turn cannot simply happen because a trucker or forwarder decides it would be convenient. It needs the carrier's sign off, and the legal and liability framework for handing that container between parties outside a terminal runs through the Uniform Intermodal Interchange and Facilities Access Agreement, a standard contract administered by the Intermodal Association of North America that governs liability when intermodal equipment changes hands between carriers, leasing companies and the motor carriers who haul it.
The real obstacles, and why carriers do not always say yes
In practice, arranging a street turn is harder than the concept sounds. It requires the right container type and size, the right carrier, the right location and the right timing to line up simultaneously: an import load emptying near enough to an export load ready to go, in a window before free time runs out on either leg, using equipment the carrier is willing to release for a different booking than the one it was planned against. Carriers also track and route their own equipment deliberately, which is the reason several of them, including Maersk, HMM and Zim, began charging a specific fee for a street turn request in 2019, reported at the time by Supply Chain Dive: Maersk's published rate was 30 dollars for a request approved in advance through its Avantida platform, rising to 100 dollars if a street turn was carried out without that approval, with HMM and Zim charging their own separate amounts in the same range. Carriers framed the charge as recovering the administrative cost of rerouting equipment from its planned itinerary; shipper groups including the Agriculture Transportation Coalition called it a disincentive against a practice that reduces truck trips and port congestion for everyone. Whether a specific carrier still charges exactly those figures today is worth confirming directly, since fee schedules like this change, but the underlying friction, a carrier controlling its own asset and charging to approve a change of plan for it, has not gone away.
| Option | Who owns the box | What it solves | What it needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard round-trip lease | The leasing company | Access to equipment without owning it | Return to a depot in the same network |
| One-way lease | The leasing company | Equipment available at an imbalanced location | Lessor approval; pickup and drop-off at different depots |
| Street turn | The ocean carrier | Reusing one box for two legs without an empty trip | Carrier sign-off, UIIA interchange coverage, matching timing and equipment |
When a street turn is worth pursuing
For a forwarder arranging drayage, a street turn is worth chasing when an import delivery and an export pickup genuinely overlap in location and timing, the carrier involved is known to approve them, and the box type matches what the exporter actually needs; under those conditions it can save a trucking leg, a day or more of detention exposure, and the administrative churn of booking two separate empty moves. It is usually not worth the coordination effort when the two bookings are with different carriers, when the timing only loosely overlaps, or when a late carrier refusal would leave the container sitting past its free time on either end. In that case, returning the box normally and treating any coverage gap through one-way leasing or standard equipment booking is the safer, more predictable move, and our guide to container damage, detention and per diem is worth reading before you take that risk on a tight schedule. The ownership question also shapes who you are negotiating with in the first place; our comparison of shipper-owned versus carrier-owned containers covers the other side of that decision, and our explainer on cross-docking and consolidation hubs looks at a different way freight avoids sitting still between legs of a journey.
None of this changes how a shipment gets quoted or booked day to day, but understanding who owns the equipment, why a one-way lease exists, and what a street turn actually requires helps explain a cost or a delay that otherwise looks arbitrary. You can browse forwarders by country, city and service in the CargoLinked directory, or post a shipment and let forwarders who already cover your lane come to you.
