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Hi.
My name is Zach Howard.
I'm a junior here at Paul College at UNH studying
business administration.
My topic for the social business innovation challenge
is homelessness.
1.6 million people across the United States are estimated
living in transitional housing or emergency shelters last
year alone.
According to the United Nations, there's 100 million
displaced or homeless people across the world.
Homelessness can be caused by numerous factors, most
prevalent being war, natural
disasters, or economic struggle.
As an example, almost one third of Syria's population is
living homeless or displaced at the present time.
My vision is to create an innovative, eco-friendly home
building company that uses the United States surplus of
shipping containers as the main structures in the
building process.
All profits that are made from building the residential homes
in commercial buildings out of these shipping containers will
go directly towards the efforts of helping the world's
homeless population by fabricating a low-cost, simple
home out of a 20 foot by 8 foot shipping container.
This shipping container home can be
shipped anywhere worldwide.
All major ports of the world use a standardized system for
loading, unloading, and transporting these shipping
containers.
Why build out of shipping containers?
Well first of all, there's a surplus of shipping containers
in the US, caused by the US trade deficit.
Most of the goods come by sea on large
shipping container vessels.
The next reasoning is you'll be using minimal wood products
during the build of these homes, which makes it very
eco-friendly.
These shipping containers can be stacked, cut, and
customized any way the buyer would like, which makes them a
very versatile structure to build out of.
Shipping containers, once painted, become very
aesthetically pleasing.
They're very modern.
They have a square look.
And they have hard lines and flat surfaces.
The last reason is they're cheap.
A 40-foot shipping containers that is wind and water tight
can be had for $3,000 or less.
I;ve researched this method of building for
the past six years.
In my spare time, I've drawn numerous floor plans for
container homes.
And I-- one day-- dream of building my home out of
recycled containers.
I'm very passionate about this topic.
Not only because it is an eco-friendly business idea,
but because it has the potential to help solve one of
the world's biggest problems.
I hope that you share the same passion as I do for containing
homelessness.