#green roofs

[unbfacts]

France now requires many new non-residential roofs to include solar panels or vegetation—at least 30% of the roof area (stepping up in coming years). This helps cut urban heat and adds clean energy.

[cognitivejustice]

Europe is leading the way on installing green roofs

Europe boasts three decades of research and product development that underpin its thriving green roof industry.

[wachinyeya]

Boston is the first US city to plant green roofs on bus stops: 'Would amount to 17 acres of green space'

This US city is the first to plant green roofs on bus stops: 'Would amount to 17 acres of green space'

These “living roofs” are already inspiring other North American cities.

First popularized in the Netherlands and now popping up across Europe, green bus stops have finally made their way to North America. 

Last August, Boston, Massachusetts installed its first 30 green bus shelters along Route 28, a corridor with some of the highest bus ridership in the city that also lands in neighborhoods disproportionately affected by extreme heat.

It’s a simple concept: Use the roof of a no-frills bus station to offset the heat-island effect in urban areas devoid of trees, provide direct shade at bus shelters, help reduce flooding, improve biodiversity of native pollinators, and see something a little more beautiful on the daily commute.

Boston made history as the first city in the United States to adopt the green roof last year, sometimes called “living roofs,” and have already made waves in other locations.

This year, according to the Washington Post, green shelters are planned in two Maryland towns, with proposals to install green roofs in Arlington, Virginia and New York. 

While it seems like a small gesture to the bees of any given city, the initiative is no small feat. 

In fact, if Boston installed living roofs on all 8,000 of its bus stops, the city estimates it would amount to 17 acres of green space, or about 13 football fields.

“These green roofs on bus shelters are not just a representation of Boston’s progress on sustainability,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement last year. 

“They are a practical, scalable solution to some of the most pressing challenges we face as a city.”

Boston’s installation was a team effort, as the city partnered with Social Impact Collective, a Boston-based, minority-owned architecture and design firm, to imagine the rooftop gardens. 

Weston Nurseries, a local plant nursery, provided the plants, and YouthBuild Boston provided some elbow grease. The nonprofit supports underserved young people as they enter the construction and design industry. 

[rjzimmerman]

An unexpected green roof benefit: purging urban rainfall of practically all microplastics

In a laboratory-scale study, green roof mockups kept 97.5 percent of microplastic particles out of runoff

Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene Magazine:

Green roofs can capture nearly all the microplastic particles that contaminate rainwater in modern cities, according to a new study. The findings add to the list of benefits of green roofs, which have previously been shown to reduce energy needed for heating and cooling buildings and calm the flow of stormwater.

“These nature-based solutions can offer unexpected co-benefits in mitigating airborne pollution in densely built environments,” says study team member Shuiping Cheng, a researcher at Tongji University in Shanghai, China.

Microplastics—small bits of material formed from the breakdown of everyday plastic products—are ubiquitous. They’re found in soil, water, air, and even our bodies, and it’s increasingly clear that they pose risks to the environment, wildlife, and human health.

Most efforts to capture microplastics in urban environments have focused on filtering them out of surface runoff in bioremediation ponds, swales, and constructed wetlands. Since green roofs are known to filter heavy metals and excess nutrients from runoff, Cheng and his colleagues wondered if they could take care of microplastics as well.

The researchers created laboratory-scale mockups of green roofs composed of shallow plastic bins half a meter square and 85 millimeters deep. They added a filter to prevent the soil from washing away, a layer of drainage material, and soil, then planted the boxes with Rhodiola rosea or Sedum lineare, two species commonly used on Shanghai green roofs.

The researchers then ground up plastic rubber into a powder of fine fragments, and pulled polyurethane into fibers. They added these microplastic particles to water at a similar concentration to what is found in urban rainwater.

They used a sprinkler-like apparatus to generate “rainfall” over the model green roofs, then measured the amount of microplastics found in the runoff, retained in the soil, and adhered to the plants.

The green roofs captured 97.5% of the microplastic particles that fell in a light “rainstorm,” the researchers report in the journal Communication Earth & Environment.

The city of Shanghai currently has 3.56 million square meters of green roof—a tiny fraction of all the roof space in the city. But even this modest array of green roofs could capture 56.2 metric tons of microplastic particles annually, the researchers calculated. This amounts to 1.65 times the amount of microplastics that enter the city’s urban water bodies from domestic wastewater.

“Our study highlights the powerful potential of urban green roofs to act as passive interceptors of atmospheric microplastics,” Cheng says.

[ecoinnovation]

Green Roofs

[wirewindow]

Turf houses: Iceland's original 'green' buildings

Known as "torfbæir", these ingeniously designed homes helped settle one of Europe's least-hospitable environments.

[wewantclimateactionnow]

As heatwaves and floods hit cities worldwide, these places are pioneering solutions

Australian cities remain woefully unprepared for the more extreme weather we are already seeing with climate change. But some cities oversea

I observe building incursions into the inherited green spaces of Melbourne city, Grand Prix grandstands, cricket facilities, basket ball courts, etc. Shame.

The ideas here are well worth investigating. Share them please.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The rise of rooftop wildlife - living slices of landscape carpeted with moss and wildflowers

With London mayoral candidates calling for green roofs across London, Madeleine Cuff examines why a growing number of people want to switch tiles for turf

A three-year EU-backed study by Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Business in the Community examined the social, economic and environmental benefits of green roofs. It found green roofs can improve air quality, reduce ambient noise levels and provide food and shelter for insects and birds.  

They may also prove crucial in helping the country adapt to the impacts of climate change. Living roofs can cool indoor air temperatures in buildings by up to four degrees, vital for vulnerable settings such as schools and hospitals during increasingly common summer heatwaves. Meanwhile, the spongy surfaces absorb excess water during rainstorms, reducing the risk of flash flooding.