Shipping containers have many lives after they serve their original purpose of containing goods during transport. In recent times they have been used for homes, office buildings, natural disaster relief shelters, and even flower shops.

We at KAT5 Homes are always excited about new projects that will improve the living conditions of people. We are excited about helping Pharma Solutions Inc. by supplying them with the containers for these pharmacies, and would like to thank Craig Reposa and Built Rite Industries for helping this project come to fruition.

As people become more mindful of their impact on the environment, more people are now thinking up innovative ways of reducing waste. A couple examples of this are reusing shipping containers and transforming them into houses or simply to fit someones business needs.

Currently, a humanitarian and entrepreneur are both in the process of transforming shipping containers into ready to go kilns. These kilns would allow farmers in third world countries to convert their farm waste and reuse it as biochar.

The United States military utilizes many unorthodox tools for problem solving. A good example of this is how the Navy has trained Dolphins to detect mines in the ocean. Dolphins are unable to detonate these mines. Instead they have been trained to locate the mines, while wearing cameras, and drop transmitters to let the Navy know where the mines are.

Shipping Containers have a wide variety of uses, ranging from transporting goods across the world, being utilized for storage purposes, used for the construction of schools, and even office buildings. With all of these unique uses could it really be possible for shipping containers to be used for National Security?

With the world economies in a downturn, it is refreshing to see one industry flourishing--"shipping container housing".

With more and more people looking for cheaper housing alternatives, shipping container homes have been the answer they've been looking for. Not only can containers be constructed cheaper than standard housing, they can also be constructed faster than modular housing. SnapSpace opened their shop doors early February and just after a couple months of forming partnerships and perfecting schematic details, they began turning shipping containers into beautiful houses.

Shipping containers are perfect for any construction project, and with minimal effort they can be used to create something as simple as a single bedroom, or can be stacked on top of each other to create office buildings, schools, or even military training facilities.

Two questions come up more than any others when people ask me about containers.  The first is about insulation, and the second is about foundations, which I'm going to talk about today.

When it comes to foundations, it's important to first understand the nature of containers and how they work structurally. A container can span it's entire length and more.  If you could securely hold one side of the container in place, it could hang the other 40 feet with no problems.  Someone I know even did a project once where they welded two containers together front to front, and made a container bridge that spanned 80 feet.  That seems a pretty amazing feat, until you look at and understand the structure of containers.  After that, it seems a simple thing.

A container, is in basic form, a giant box truss. Think covered bridge.  The small square top rail, and small beam along the bottom of the container act as a top and bottom cord on a truss, while the steel siding acts as a webbing.  When you take a high cube container, you then have a 9.5 foot tall truss, and it's no suprise it can span such a distance.

So why is that important?  Well, in it's unaltered form, a container can span it's full 40 feet, sitting on just it's four corners.  Think of containers stacked in shipping yards.  They are fully loaded with cargo, but when stacked, all of the weight is sitting on the four corners, and the container spans the entire 40 feet.  The normal load of a house or occupied building is going to be significantly less than that of a fully loaded cargo container.  So by theory, you only need to support the 4 corners of the container.  You can even come in a few feet and allow the end ends to hang off as much as you like, creating a cantilever.