Guest Post: A Sustainable Business for Social Good: G3BOX

Apr 2, 2012 10:00 PM ET
Campaign: 3BL Blogs

Posted by Beth Bengtson

As a socially conscience business, we believe it is important to promote sustainable practices throughout the healthcare and medical field. We were inspired by this story of four engineering students from ASU who turned a class project into a real world solution for social good by repurposing old and used shipping containers.

The assignment was to design a function for the numerous abandoned shipping containers at ports across the world. Due to the high cost of returning shipping containers, many companies desert them once they reach their destination. Gabrielle Palermo, a biomedical engineering student, and her team immediately decided they wanted to create a solution that could help people. Eventually, they came up with G3Box, a company that coverts steel shipping containers into low-cost, modular, and mobile medical clinics. The idea is to sell these transformed mobile units to nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations for use in developing nations. G3Box, which stands for “generating global good,” can be used by hospitals, organizations looking to expand their facilities, or as temporary clinics in disaster zones.

The containers come equipped with ventilation, insulation, power, water, and other services the customer may request and can cost between $12,000 and $18,000 to build. According the Palermo, the biggest need is for medical clinics, however the containers may be used for “any type of social work” including classrooms, food distribution units, dental offices, or whatever someone may need.

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This blog was originally published by Beth Bengtson on the Hale Advisors company blog. Click here to view it on that site and to read more of Beth's work. Distributed with permission of the author.