Green Roofs- For a Green Tomorrow: Eco Living Articles: Eco20/20

Green Roofs- For a Green Tomorrow

If you have ever had the chance to take a helicopter ride over a large city or even just look at aerial pictures taken from high above a city, there is one thing that is guaranteed you will see - a sea of ugly tar and concrete roofs hanging over buildings like a guilty conscience. Not only are these roofs not very appealing to the eye, they also tend to be inefficient as well.

But these ugly roofs might be a thing of the past with an increasing interest in green roofs. A green roof is one that has vegetation populating the roof and this simple criterion can be a powerful tool that can clean up the air we breathe and the water we drink along with a whole host of other benefits. A green roof is not something that is very difficult at all to retrofit a building with. At face value all you need is a roof, some soil, some plants, and your done, but the paybacks of having a green roof far outnumber the costs.

The aesthetically pleasing idea of a green roof is that you can make it your own. Some buildings like to make small parks on top of their roofs complete with trees, shrubs, and benches. Maybe your building would like to take a more hungered approach and grow some nice fresh fruits and vegetables up there. Maybe you don't have as big of a green thumb as others and you just want to plant some native vegetation on the roof and let it grow with hardly any maintenance at all. The amazing thing about a green roof is that all of these options are possible and are only limited by your imagination. What is more amazing are the other benefits that are associated with building a green roof.

Besides being beautiful, a green roof could save you a hefty amount of "green" all year round. A nice park or garden on top of a large building's roof makes for a great insulator which is a way of saying a green roof can decrease cooling loads by 50%-90% and also cuts heating costs in the winter.

Most studies also agree that if green roofs were employed by more buildings in major urban areas, that rainwater and runoff would be cleaner and be filtered of many harmful pollutants, air quality would increase, and some studies have even shown that green roofs help make citizens of cities healthier and less prone to ailments like asthma.

Amazingly enough green roofs benefits still don't stop there. Many green roofs in a city can also help curb a condition known as the urban heat island effect. This is a were all of that tar and cement in a city collects and stores heat from the sun and then slowly releases that heat throughout the day and night causing a city to actually be hotter than it really should be. By having green roofs, that sunlight is absorbed by the vegetation instead of the tar and cement roofs, which would lead to a cooling of the city. More importantly its probably safe to say that not too many people would be opposed to a cooler city especially in the summer months.

Of course anytime you add something like a green roof to a building, certain precautions have to be taken. A green roof can potentially add up to 80 pounds per square foot to the roof of a building, but through the miracles of modern engineering, this is usually something that can be adequately planned for and taken care of. Given the facts that a green roof has so many benefits and very few costs, it becomes easy to imagine why interest in green roofs have really taken off in the past decade and should continue to grow in popularity which will only make our air cleaner, our water more pure, and our cities more beautiful.