Recycled Shipping Containers

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• St. Louis-based The Lawrence Group is partnering with a new company, SG BLOCKS™ (Safe Green Blocks™) of St. Louis, in designing an engineered system for building single-family and multi-family homes as well as commercial developments from recycled shipping containers.

• Recycled shipping containers, one of the latest trends in sustainable building materials, are strong, readily available, quick to assemble and provide an environmentally conscious alternative for constructing homes and other buildings.

• Unlike other attempts to recycle these containers, the SG BLOCKS™ approach is to utilize them as an engineered structural system that can be used in virtually any home and building design an architect may desire. SG BLOCKS™ can be fabricated throughout the country, and will be built to specifications to assure consistency.

• SG Blocks™ uses sustainable and precision technology to transform certified ISBU shipping containers into strong structural building components for homes, housing developments, offices, military units, or any structure you may desire.

• SG BLOCKS™ in conjunction with The Lawrence Group currently is studying the use of 500 containers for construction of a multi-family senior living facility in California. SG BLOCKS™also is working on such diverse projects as administrative office buildings at Fort Bragg, apartment buildings in Phoenix and Myrtle Beach, and Port Authority security offices in Jacksonville.

• SG BLOCKS™ was founded in part by Steve Armstrong and Bruce Russell, also founders of The Stratford Companies of St. Louis, and principal innovator David Cross who serves as Business Development Officer. In addition to St. Louis, SG BLOCKS™ offices also are located in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Colorado.

• There are more than 11 million shipping containers in circulation worldwide. More than 300,000 of these containers are sitting unused in a variety of port cities throughout the United States due to an imbalance in the import/export trade. In most instances, it costs a company more to ship the container back to the country it came from than to store it.

• This stock represents a potential of more than 90 million sq. ft. of “Value-Cycled™” green construction. A relationship with Triton Containers, the world’s largest container, will assure an ample supply of the quality containers.

• Making a ton of steel from virgin materials uses 6,481 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 1,784 kilowatts to recycle a ton of steel from 100 percent scrap. But it takes only 800 kilowatt-hours of energy to convert shipping containers into SG Blocks. As a result, SG Blocks meet a number of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) requirements.

• The Triton containers are made of steel and are 40’ long, 8’ wide and 9.5’ tall with marine-grade plywood flooring. They are certified as ISBUs assuring the construction and environmental quality of the container.

• Containers are modified into SG BLOCKS™ by cutting out windows and doors. By putting them together in different structural designs, they can be fabricated into a house or building. The structures sit on a regular concrete foundation over a crawl space, basement or slab.

• Preliminary testing and actual field experience to-date indicates that homes made from recycled shipping containers are acoustically sound, can be easily insulated and can be finished with any type of skin, including brick and siding, to make them look like a conventional home. New space-age technology, such as ceramic insulating coating, is being used to increase the insulation values of the walls as compared to conventional fiberglass insulation.

• Because the process is in development stage, single-family individual homes made of the recycled shipping containers tend to be slightly more expensive than stick built. But because the homes are incredibly sturdy, the premium paid may be well worth it in area prone to hurricanes and earthquakes.

• Commercial and multi-family applications are showing good promise of being competitive with conventional construction materials and providing many side benefits in terms of strength, durability and speed of erection.