from the ground up - The Tyee

twentieth century, purely local markets for goods ofany sort were few and far between.”One of the world’s first purpose-built intermodalcontainer ships set sail from North Vancouver inNovember of 1955. The Clifford J. Rodgers carried600 containers to Skagway, Alaska, where they wereloaded on to rail to be carried over the White Pass tothe Yukon.Today, Port Metro Vancouver is Canada’s busiest port.More than two million “twenty-foot equivalent units,”or TEUs, flow through every year, according to portrecords. (Containers come in five basic sizes. A standard20-foot-long by 8-foot-wide container equals oneTEU. A 40-foot container is two TEUs.)The vast majority of containers arriving in Metroports hail from China, followed by Japan and Korea.And most return to the nations that sent them. Butalmost 100,000 get left behind each year.In 2009, for example, records show that a total of1,122,849 TEUs entered Port Metro Vancouver, whileonly while 1,029,613 TEUs were shipped outbound.That’s a difference of 93,236 containers.Likewise, in 2008, Metro ports took in 96,509 moreTEUs than they sent away.Those containers don’t all pile up in the Lower Mainland.Most leave the region via truck or rail car, andmany of those ultimately leave Canada via a bordercrossing or another seaport. But North America’slongstanding imbalance of trade with China and otherAsian exporters tends to create a backwash of surpluscontainers in places Vancouver and other port cities.Greener than concrete, stronger than woodContainers are built to stack nine high while carrying60,000 pounds on a deck that’s pitching on the openocean. They are built to survive decades of service ina marine environment, and, if kept painted, will lastindefinitely as part of a building.“These are just big steel boxes,” said Barry Naef,who directs the GreenCube Network and the IntermodalSteel Building Unit (ISBU) Association. Naefnoted that these boxes present the opportunity to notmerely recycle but creatively reuse what is arguablythe most durable waste product of the globalizationera. Stranded containers that are not repurposed tendto be melted down. As fuel costs rise, containers onthe wrong side of the ocean can become worth moreas scrap metal than the cost of shipping them back toChina empty.A typical 40-foot container represents about 8,000pounds of steel, which can require about 8,000kilowatt-hours of energy to melt and remanufacture.That’s about half of what a typical home uses in ayear. As a result, buildings created from used shippingcontainers function like carbon reduction and longtermstorage devices.At the same time, containers tend to replace concretein more urban settings, due to the metal boxes’strength and easy stackability. And cement is far fromgreen.The manufacturing of cement is the largest source ofcarbon dioxide emissions after fossil fuel consumption,according to U.S. government statistics. A reportby the World Business Council found that every tenpounds of cement releases nine pounds of carbondioxide emission.But according to Barry Naef, the biggest green advantageof shipping containers may be their strength.“Their strength allows the structure to provide greenroofs, green walls, solar hot water roofs, all withoutadditional supports,” Naef said. “It’s hard to do thesethings on a wood-frame structure. “Concrete is great.But when you have to go spend so much to do a greenroof, I don’t think it winds up getting built.”Construction costs 25 per cent lessIn port regions such as Vancouver, end-of-life shippingcontainers are often sold for as little as $1,500in the Lower Mainland, while pristine 40-foot “highcubes” -- which feature nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings-- can fetch $4,000. Either way, it’s substantially lessthan the cost of building a similar box out of wood orconcrete.2