Green Roofs: 13 Amazing Facts

The Daily Green:

Green roofs and living walls offer many benefits, including cooling buildings, reducing stormwater runoff, providing wildlife habitat, growing food and creating jobs.

Read the whole story: The Daily Green

Comments

[missouriwatcher]

06:14 PM on 07/20/2010

This is an excellent way of combating the oppressive heat of cities. In addition, green roofs can provide a lot fresh produce for city dwellers--the surplus can also be marketed.

[santiago sherwood]

04:34 PM on 07/20/2010

fact 14 they are beautiful and for a person that looks out the window at work, IT does something for my mental health

[quillsinister]

12:40 PM on 07/20/2010

I would personally love living in a hobbit hole with a little garden on the roof, close enough to work that I can ride a bike. That's just fine with me. :-)

[missouriwatcher]

06:11 PM on 07/20/2010

If you have the money and land for one, it CAN be done.

[jsarets]

11:57 AM on 07/20/2010

From a thermodynamic standpoint, green roofs combine mass, insulation, and evaporation. They may also have higher solar reflectivity than some conventional roofing surfaces, but not nearly as high as cool roofs.

While green roofs represent a novel and attractive embodiment of these properties, this is definitely not the only way to achieve these properties, and in many (if not most) cases, it is not the most efficient solution in terms of cost or water consumption.

Green roofs make sense in hot and wet climates where they can be watered by natural rainfall.

In colder climates, it is highly undesirable to have a moist lawn wicking precious heat from the top of the building, so they are better off with insulation that doesn't retain water.

In drier climates, any other evaporative cooling method would be more water-efficient, and air-cooled systems might be more ecologically sound.

For example, some modern energy-efficient buildings use an evaporative cooling tower to pre-cool the chilled water loop and reduce or eliminate the load on the chiller.

A more direct approach is to use rooftop solar water panels to intercept heat, and excess heat can also be rejected by air-cooled radiator or geothermal ground loop.

It makes ecological sense if the owner wants to grow food on their roof, but the extensive sedum roof has more aesthetic value than engineering merit.

In most cases, there are better ways to decrease cooling loads and certainly heating loads.

[missouriwatcher]

06:12 PM on 07/20/2010

Very nicely and convincingly stated.

[BannedNBoston]

10:04 AM on 07/20/2010

We need them in Central New Hampster too. I love the solar panels with grass too...