Out of San Francisco comes a fascinating new green idea—reusing shipping containers for housing that would otherwise collect and clutter shipping yards and overtime rust and degrade the acres of land they are stacked upon. The man behind it: Joel Karr, an architect who has devoted much of his career to sustainable solutions involving underused shipping containers (50% of shipping containers receive only a single use due to the cost of reusing them for shipping). Container Nation, a subsidiary of Karr’s firm, Group 41, recently revealed some of its newest concepts for reuse of shipping containers.
Karr’s first experiment in Tokyo involved using the containers as trash receptacles to power surrounding buildings with methane gas created by the waste. Since then, his ideas have become even more inventive progressing from rough reuse in the shipping yards to stacking containers to create mixed-income apartment housing. It seems improbable, but a housing project in Salt Lake City, Utah, begs to differ. There, shipping containers may provide a low-cost building material creating a simplistic and synergetic solution to low-cost housing and container reuse. Proposals for the project scheduled to begin in early 2010 include two different stacking designs: the “Red Container Scheme” and the “Curve Scheme”.
"Red Container Scheme"
Besides this ingenious use, containers may also be used for homeless housing or emergency housing. To see more on this, check out Container Nation's video for Google’s 10 to the 100th competition.