Craig B. Rushton

What’s made of Corten steel, can spend 25 years in the ocean before rusting, lasts more than 100 years on land and is scattered across the PNE grounds this year?

A shipping container.

This year the nearly indestructible boxes are being used as concession stands, art galleries and showcased as sustainable housing at the fair’s Green Scene exhibit.

Two B.C. entrepreneurs involved in the exhibit want their fellow citizens to think of containers, a familiar sight to most Vancouverites, as a potential answer for tomorrow’s housing problems.

Keith Dewey, the owner and designer of Zigloo container homes, is showing people a version of his container homes complete with, solar panels, a roof garden and rain water collection tanks.

“Vancouver more than most places in Canada has the mindset that encourages people to think green and find alternatives to the way things have always been done,” Dewey said. “[The PNE] provides forward-thinking pioneering ideas like this an opportunity to reach out to almost a million people.”Dewey said he hopes to build awareness of these houses that take much less time and cost about 20-per-cent less to build than conventional houses.

The containers can be insulated against heat and cold, last much longer than other building materials and be broken down and recycled at the end of their shelf lives.

“I think it’s just a matter of public perception — until you actually stand in a shipping container that has been transformed into a living unit, you’ll never really understand that it is a comfortable, efficient and affordable solution,” Dewey said. “The public ... just sees them as container boxes sitting down there in stacks by the ocean.”

He lives in Victoria with his wife and daughter in a 2,000-square-foot prototype made of eight containers that took six and a half months to build. Dewey said so far the only problem with living in big steel boxes has been the amount of public attention the three-storey dwelling receives from passersby.

To date he has about a dozen buildings in their planning stages and one set to break ground in New Westminster this fall.

Steven Cross of Kottage RV is also part of the exhibit with his model RV made out of a 12-metre shipping container. Cross, working out of Penticton, invented and applied for a patent on a sliding technology that allows for an extra metre of space to be added to the sides of the containers.

“Everybody for the last 10 years has been trying to come up with container houses because everybody knows the container is the strongest box in the world,” Cross said between giving the public tours of his immaculate RV. “It doesn’t leak and it can last a hundred-plus years.”

His units range in cost from a one-bedroom model at $59,900 to a three-bedroom container for $89,900.

Cross said he already has orders for 192 units from clients including an RV park in Harrison Mills and the Nisga’a aboriginal community.