But the final goal is to put the containers back on the ship after it gets unstuck, no? I imagine the point of the containers being on the ship in the first place is that there are not enough trucks on land to get the containers off the desert to their destinations.
Right now the goal is to unblock the canal; if the entire cargo were lost in the process, that would be expensive, but I'm not confident it'd be more expensive than blocking shipping through for an extra fortnight.
It sounded like they were intended to drop them on land, where one would hope no ships would be hitting them. 'Lost' would be referring to the likely chance that once put on the desert they wouldn't be retrieved.