I've had a shipping container home question for some time: What is done to the containers to get rid of any toxic residue left from their lives as shipping containers?

@zaftigartist

Generally, not a lot can be done, as shipping containers are practically *made* of toxins in order to prevent bugs and corrosion.

Shipping containers have high levels of chromates in the paint due to the marine coatings. They're typically made in China/Asia, places known not to care much about lead / heavy metals pollution. The wooden floors are typically made of non-sustainably harvested tropical hardwoods and impregnated with highly toxic pesticides. So basically you have to rip out the floor, sandblast every square inch of painted surface, and only *then* can you start construction - but there are still more problems. The most popular way of putting in windows/doors is a plasma cutter or fireman's saw or acetylene torch, which burns the metal and coats every interior surface with toxic metal dust. Shipping containers are also terribly heat conductive (being steel) and hard to heat and cool even with spray-in insulation. Also, the structural integrity is badly compromised when you cut the corrugated steel walls to put in windows/doors so making multistory designs becomes dicey.

Due to all these factors, the best thing to do with shipping containers is to crush and recycle them, not use them as houses. I used to think that shipping container housing was cool until I did some research. I was involved with an artists' collective here that wanted to do a shipping container art center, but we settled on a conventional steel framed structure - it's recyclable, sustainable, and long-lasting with no added toxins as it's meant to be a habitable space from the get-go.

I can see how that would be really tough to keep warm/cool. Is there an effective way to do that in a shipping container home?

@ddaisy88

"Is there an effective way to do that in a shipping container home?"

No.

This is why you typically only see full containers used as homes in pretty mild climates. Any insulation you add on the inside decreases your livable space (4" of insulation doesn't sound like much but that drops your interior width from 7'8" to 7', an 8% reduction!). The home in the article looks like they just ripped apart a standard container and used the steel, which means the house should really just be titled "Conventional home that happens to use small pieces of a shipping container".

IMHO, the only reason to use a shipping container as a house is if it is actually going to be shipped on a ship, train, or truck to various locations around the world, used for awhile, and shipped somewhere else. This means that it retains all of its structural strength and has no windows or other cuts in the exterior, as that's the only way a shipping company will take it. The best way I've seen of doing this is to fill the entire end of the container with two glass doors inset behind the structural steel doors that allows light and air exchange in the structure.