Компания Northwest Container Services прекращает работу в Портленде и Сиэтле

Northwest Container Services to halt Portland, Seattle operations Published 4:24 pm Monday, August 24, 2026 Agricultural exporters in Oregon have been thrown for a loop by the shutdown of key facilities through which they move containers to Puget Sound ports. The Northwest Container Services transportation company has sent a letter notifying customers that its locations in Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash., will cease operations “effectively immediately.” For four decades, exporters of hay, straw and other farm commodities grown in Oregon have relied on its Portland facility to switch containers from trucks to rail, sending them to Puget Sound ports on the way to Asian markets. “It’s a pretty vital gateway for Willamette Valley products to get up to Seattle-Tacoma,” said Alexis Jacobson, international accounts manager for Bossco Trading, a forage exporter near Tangent, Ore. Northwest Container Services has told customers that its Portland and Seattle locations discontinued truck operations on Aug. 21 and will stop accepting new containers after Aug. 28. Those facilities will require all existing containers to be removed from the sites by Sept. 15. However, the company noted that it’s “working with a third party to explore continued operations at the Portland facility,” which may affect the scheduled wind-down of its operations. Agricultural exporters expect that Portland Container, a transportation company that offers similar services, may be able to take over the operations at the Portland site, but there’s still much uncertainty about whether that will happen and how the new arrangement would work. Neither Northwest Container Services nor Portland Container were available for comment as of press time. Vigorous competition For years, those two companies have been in vigorous competition, which has been good for shippers but likely “rough” on both of them, said Gerry Diercks, general manager of Golden Valley Farms, a straw exporter near Silverton, Ore. “What’s that going to do to our costs when that competition is gone? We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. Golden Valley Farms moves roughly 40% of its straw volume through the Northwest Container Services site in Portland, but Diercks said he’s not ready to “rush to judgment” as to how the closure will affect his company’s operations. With so much still up in the air, it will take another week or two to put the situation in perspective, he said. “It really depends on what the ship lines are going to do,” Diercks said. The ocean carriers who worked with Northwest Container Services to get containers to Puget Sound ports may decide to pull out from serving Portland, he said. “Now that would be really bad news.” Portland typically struggles to have enough empty containers available for exports, and ocean carriers don’t particularly relish moving them from other ports, Diercks said. If they withdraw from serving that market, exporters would likely have to truck their products all the way to the Puget Sound directly, he said. “I don’t think anyone really wants to see that.” If Portland Container takes over the route used by Northwest Container Services, that would mitigate concerns for exporters, though questions would remain about how long that transition would take, Diercks said. One concern is whether Portland Container would be able to enter into the same contracts to move product by rail to the Puget Sound, said Jacobson of Bossco Trading. Rail tends to be less expensive than trucking but is “very contract-based,” she said. Exporters have heard for a couple of years that Northwest Container Services was struggling, so the closure of the Portland and Seattle facilities doesn’t come as a total surprise, Jacobson said. “There was a sense of something could happen,” she said. Agricultural exporters in the Northwest have generally been “less competitive in the global shipping market,” largely due to the high costs of labor and doing business, she said. Shipping to China through ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach tends to be a fraction of the cost of shipping through the Puget Sound, but it’s not an option due to the long distance and other constraints, Jacobson said. “No matter what, we’re competing against exponentially cheaper prices,” she said. Jacobson said she expects that exporters will find a way to deal with the closure of Northwest Container Services’ facilities, though they’re currently faced with a lot of uncertainty. “Everything in shipping seems to work itself out, it just makes for heartburn in between,” she said.