Of course, one of the great benefits of container shipping is that a shipment can be placed on a chassis and trucked nearly anywhere.
But problems quickly arise if you want to remove the container from a chassis and don’t have a toplifter, crane or other piece of equipment to do so.
Malcom Duncan, president of Excalibur Shelters of Okotoks in Alberta, Canada, sees an opportunity in that problem and has created a new product called the SL-Tainer.
The container has legs built into the side of each corner that fold out and use a hydraulic system to lift and lower the container from the chassis.
A truck loaded with the SL-Tainer can drive the container to a remote location, swing those legs out, raise the container up enough so that the chassis can pull out, and then lower the container to the ground. Similarly, the process can be reversed: the container can be raised and a truck can back a chassis or flatbed beneath it for loading.
Duncan said there is enough clearance that the driver can do this easily. Also, the legs of the SL-Tainer fold neatly into the side of the container so that it can easily be put on a vessel or railcar like any other ISO container.
A shipper could, he explained, move a container to a remote location in Africa or Alaska and place it on the ground, and the units could be used by the military or for disaster relief.
Placed on the ground, retailers could use the containers as seasonal warehouses, storage space that a forklift could drive into, or workers can access without clambering up and down steps.
Originally from South Africa, Duncan said he designed the container lift for cargo, but some unexpected ideas have come his way, including a call from a group needing to relocate 100 rhinoceros.
“They can’t afford to lose one, and when they normally pull a rhinoceros onto a truck, they manhandle it. It’s at an angle, they are stressing them all the time. They want our container to lift the animals,” he said.
This column was published in the October 2015 issue of American Shipper.
