Shipping Containers – The World’s Most Sustainable Restaurants

Shipping containers are a perfect solution for setting up a pop-up restaurant. As we already covered in our blog about container stores, container restaurants can be installed almost everywhere and they are very likely to gather a lot of crowd. Some very well know companies have already set up a mobile restaurant.

In 2010, the sandwich company Subway had a shipping container restaurant on top of the five story Freedom Tower in New York. Subway established the restaurant for the construction workers who would otherwise have needed 45 minutes to get down from the construction. The containers had the Subway logo on a yellow background and the flag of the USA that represented the recovering from 9/11 and the resurrection of the American Dream. (source)

Shipping containers are also a form of sustainable building and offer an eco-friendly and a low-cost solution for starting restaurants.  One of the world’s best coffee shops, Starbucks, has also used shipping containers and build such an eco-friendly drive-thru cafe in Seattle. Alongside with shipping containers, the architecture also enables the collecting of rainwater and thereby lowering water consumption. (source)

In 2011, the people of London, Moscow, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Delhi, Dubai and Sydney had a chance to enjoy traditional Singaporean food that was offered form a shipping container restaurant. Thanks for shipping container’s mobility the Singapore Takeout was able to serve people in these cities within 12 months. (source)

As a new business idea, shipping container restaurants are an ideal low-cost choice. During these hard times in the economy, people who have always wanted start an own restaurant, but feel the lack of enough capital seem to have found a solution.

Shanghai Metal Corporation has a wide variety of containers including 20 ft, 40 ft, reefer containers and open top containers to name but a few. For more details, please visit our website or send us an inquiry from here. Please also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: Inthrald, Weburbanist, Urban Times, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Westphoria

Living on the Edge of a Floating House

In today’s world people are taking construction business the dew dimensions. The ultimate extremes seem to be in space and underwater but another setting of prefab architecture is on the surface of water.

The world has many examples of beautiful floating architecture. A floating house has basically two features that are superior compared to their on-the-ground counterparts.

First, floating houses offer safety in areas suffering from floods. An article on BBC tells about an idea of floating houses saving people from UK’s floods. Besides residence, also school buildings have been converted into floatable forms. The concept of floating school buildings has already been applied in Nigeria.

Second, a floating building also operates as a transportation method. An example has been set in Finland, where sauna rafts have become a sort of a summer trend. Sauna rafts are basically rafts that are equipped with motor engines that move the raft in a moderate speed. Inhabitat has written more about the design of Finnish sauna rafts that also include a patio and hammocks. Formerly Shanghai Metal Corporation wrote an article about container saunas and container swimming pools, but this solution has both of them in one package.

For construction businesses the environment brings challenges as we’ve seen in case of floating architecture. In large major projects it’s the pioneers of the business who define the standards for quality. Shanghai Metal Corporation is one of them, not only because of the width of its business that encompasses prefab building, containers and steel building but also due its success in executing successful projects including some of the largest steel bridges in China.

For information about our construction projects, please visit our website. Please also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

#BuildingValueAcrossTheGlobe

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: BBC, The Huffington Post, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Inhabitat