Living in a Shipping Container Home – an Eco-friendly Lifestyle
One of the ways is to become more eco-friendly and responsible is recycling or processing used materials into new products. Today, books are now printed on recycled paper, Fleece Sweaters are made of recycled plastics and the Lithium in old batteries can be used for new batteries.
But how about Housing? More and more people make use of old shipping containers for building eco-friendly houses. In this case we can even call it Up-Cycling.
Building Homes from used shipping containers saves trees as it eliminates the use of many wood elements. Another point is energy saving during the construction, which is usually much quicker in comparison to traditional house building. On the other hand, when a shipping container is out of service, it is either stored indefinitely (wasting away and contaminating soil) or melted down resulting in high energy losses and atmosphere contamination. Building container homes, hotels, hospitals, or dormitories allows us to avoid those effects on the environment.
Living in a container home may become a symbol of personal commitment to eco-friendly living, combined with using alternative energy, recycling waste, consuming water sparingly, or growing organic food in the garden.
There are already successful examples of container homes such as Container City in London, or the biggest container city Keetwonen Student Housing in Amsterdam are just the few examples. It means there is a movement of global container housing, and we need to further develop the idea, improving the technology, developing better insulation materials, and, of course, make this type of alternative housing more popular or even trendy.
Another aspect of their eco-friendlyness is the fact that they are very durable and weather proof. Shipping containers are built to withstand the most unforgiving weather conditions, travelling hundreds of thousands of miles aboard open-top trans-oceanic container ships. Made of pre-fabricated steel and welded together, they are made to be rigid and strong, and very hard-wearing. This makes them hugely practical in areas of high geological activity, such as earthquake zones and hurricane hotspots. They are built to have a minimum working life of 20 years under harsh conditions (heat, cold, saltwater, storm) before being decommissioned. When placed in a fixed position and maintained well, these containers have an almost infinite lifespan. When anchored correctly shipping containers can easily hold out against windspeeds of up to 175mp/h (281km/h).
Photo Credits: randomwire via Compfight cc
