The mammoth freight ships will be the largest in the world carrying 18,000 enormous containers packed with goods from Asia.

Costing £111million a piece the ships will be able to hold a staggering 180 million Apple i-pods or 111 million pairs of trainers.

Freight a minute: Each vessel is six times the length of the QE2 - the same as 43 London buses or four jumbo jets lined up end to end.

The 1,312ft long Triple E sea monsters are to be launched between 2013 and 2015 by Danish liner Maersk after it signed a contract with Daewoo Shipbuilding on Monday.

They will have 16 per cent more room than the company's current largest ships, the PS-class vessels, which are already some of the largest on the sea.

Ten of the giant sea monsters will initially be built but there is an option for another 20 to be manufactured in a £3.7billion shipping order that would be the biggest ever in the world.

Each vessel is six times the length of the QE2 - the same as 43 London buses or four jumbo jets lined up end to end.

The Triple E ships will set sail from the booming countries in the far east bringing cheap goods to major ports including Felixstowe, Rotterdam and Bremerhaven.

China's thundering economy which is set to grow by 10 per cent a year over the next decade has fuelled the building of the ships.

Small fry: The enormous sea monster Triple E ships will have 16 per cent more room than the company's current PS-class ships pictured here

Elephants can't gallop: The new 93ft-wide giants are slower than conventional vessels like this one, only managing a top speed of just 23 knots.

The 165,000 leviathans are to be built in the Daewoo yards in South Korea and are predicted to cut costs by 26 per cent.

But the 93ft-wide giants are slower than conventional vessels, only managing a top speed of just 23 knots.

Incredibly, they can be manned by a crew of just 13 skilled sailors but carry 2,500 more 20ft containers than any other ship currently on the sea.

They are said to use around 50 per cent less fuel and emit 20 per cent less C02 than even the most eco-friendly vessels.

Even the materials of the super-ships - including every nut and bolt - will be logged so that they can be recycled in the futures.

They will be equipped with a 'waste heat recovery system,' which will save up to 10 percent of main engine power.

The engines will be smaller than on many other large container ships, operating at an average of only 19 knots, slightly slower than other large container ships.

Each vessel will sail 115,000 nautical miles a year, or round the world four-and-a-half times.

Eivind Kolding, chief executive of Maersk said: 'When you take goods off a supermarket shelf most probably came on a container.

'Container shipping reaches consumers wherever they are. Globalisation could not have happened without a very efficient container shipping industry.

'We will set new standards far beyond what the regulators imagine today.

'Should we decide to go for all 30 vessels, it is going to be close to $6 billion, and that will make it the largest order ever seen in shipping.'

Sang-Tae Nam, chief executive of Daewoo, said the new vessels will be launched sometime between 2013 and 2015.

He added: 'It will open a new chapter and change the landscape of shipping and shipbuilding.'