Repurposing Shipping Containers Comes Under the Domestic Spotlight

Since their development in the 1950s, shipping containers have become a ubiquitous part of modern life. They are scattered around the major cities of the world, stacked in freight yards, carried on the back of big rig trucks and loaded en masse onto ultra large container ships for transport around the world. In the sixty years since they were first used to simplify the handling of cargo, these solidly constructed steel boxes have found their way out of the intermodal network into a diverse range of other uses. Among the most popular alternate uses for shipping containers is as domestic storage, or even living space, and this has brought the focus of many local building authorities squarely onto containers and their use in domestic situations.

While many people see shipping containers as ready built, weather proof storage options, just as many see them as eyesores that they don’t want as a part of their suburban landscape. In many cases local building authorities agree and, in some places, they are beginning to place restrictions on the use of shipping containers as domestic storage spaces. Recently, the Californian city of Menifee has been working on legislation that would ban the use of containers for storage in urban areas, stating that they are unattractive and may depreciate property values. On the other side of the argument, proponents for repurposing shipping containers say that they are cheap, rust proof and usually rodent resistant as well, making them an excellent, ready built storage solution that is over engineered for the job. In contrast, some places have embraced the architectural use of shipping containers, especially in the face of rising house prices worldwide, as a way to quickly, and inexpensively create living spaces. The standard size of shipping containers has also made them popular as pop up business locations and businesses like Australia’s Commonwealth Bank have begun to use repurposed containers to take their financial services out on the road.

With an estimated 17 million shipping containers already existing and with an estimated 2.5 million teus of new containers currently being constructed every year there are already more in service than are required to meet the capacity requirements of the world’s entire intermodal network. This has inspired many people to examine the potential for repurposing them for other functions as a means of recycling not only the materials that they have been manufactured from but also the energy that went into constructing them.