Gerald Hanks
A Houston company says it is dedicated to sustaining an environmentally-friendly environment, moving its operations into an office building made out of used shipping containers:
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RISE Industries (as in “Resilient, Innovative, Sustainable and Efficient,” according to its website) recently crafted their Midtown office complex out of 40-foot-long steel shipping containers, which reportedly came cleaned and retrofitted for indoor use.
Mike Dietrich, an environmental scientist and the founder of RISE, said the building is also equipped with solar cells for power, recycled nylon fishing nets for carpet and equipment designed to pull moisture from Houston’s humid air for water.
The building is said to represent Dietrich’s vision of a “Zero Energy, Zero Water, and Zero Waste Future,” the company’s motto.
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New downtown, Houston businesses using shipping containers as the basis of their buildings’ structures are not entirely revolutionary for the area:
GreenSpace Holdings, an environmental construction company, is reportedly in the process of building a Pearland self-storage facility made from 325 shipping containers.
According to GreenSpace, the construction process using shipping containers is much faster and cheaper than the same processes using conventional materials, with each shipping container costing between $1,500 and $2,000 for up to 320 square feet.
Dietrich and his company said they want to take the process a step further by creating buildings not needing outside utilities to operate:
“If we could plop down a building that’s producing all of its own energy and all of its own water in a safe manner, you don’t have to worry about the logistics of supply,” he said in an interview with the Houston Chronicle. “The shipping container buildings are great, but there’s other technologies, building technologies, that are super energy efficient. And it’s really about building smart buildings. It doesn’t have to be a shipping container. This is just an example of how to build a smart building.”
