In the past decade or so there’s been an increasing interest in converting shipping containers into houses. The general idea is that you’re recycling whatever container(s) that would simply end up abandoned into a Tiny House. Building a tiny house out of a container seems to offer numerous advantages:
- Speed to build
- Portability after construction
- Lower material cost
- Recycled materials
Criticism
Every single advantage above has a massive caveat.
Speed - cleaning and retrofitting a container is not fast. You have to basically build an entire house inside the container. The walls get the same framing as they would if you were using ONLY framed walls.
Portability - this is only true if you keep the units in their original, boxed state. Many/most container homes utilize multiple containers, thereby making them immovable.
Cost - again retrofitting the container is hard. You don’t really save much on materials, and the cost of the container and its restoration has to be factored in.
Recycling - most shipping container homes are built using “one-way” containers. An easier way to recycle them would simply be to use them as shipping containers again to send stuff back the other way. Once a container isn’t viable for use to ship stuff, people aren’t really building houses out of it anyways.