Green Roof Resource

May is Curb Your Car Month. To encourage this, the getDowntown is hosting a commuter challenge where businesses log their employees’ miles not driven into work. Options include biking, telecommuting, taking the bus, or walking. Included in the website is a commute calculator, which estimates how much money is spent monthly and annually by the user to commute to work. getDowntown is a program developed by the Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce, the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority (AATA), the City of Ann Arbor and the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) to address concerns about traffic and congestion in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Treehugger posted about the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s new ad campaign. I couldn’t resist helping to further distribute the misinformation. In case there wasn’t enough confusion in the public over global warming, CEI sets the record straight that people exhale carbon dioxide and trees “breathe” it in. Sounds like there’s a need for more investment in green roofs.

While I agree that “the development and promotion of free market approaches to environmental policy” is necessary (and my research focuses on market-based approaches), I do not agree with their efforts to “fight against the global warming scare”. Go see An Inconvenient Truth and read Andrew Revkin’s new children’s book, The North Pole was Here. How we approach the problem is still open for discussion (and the free market is necessary in tackling this problem), but there is sufficient evidence that global warming is happening.

Before the conference, an article on Green Roofs for Healthy Cities introduced the Do It Yourself Green Roof Kit by GreenGrid. The premise is that sedum in 4 inches of soil media will grow pretty much anywhere. This was one of the conclusions from the Brad Rowe’s talk last week.

GreenGrid’s product was unveiled at the “http://www.gardeninacity.org/”>Garden in the City Show this week. This is the first gardening and landscape show in the US that focuses on the urban environment. The show is sponsored by the City of Chicago, Chicago Park District, Parkways Foundation, and Target - the first big box store in Chicago with a green roof. With the new DIY product and Walmart’s greening debut, it’s only a matter of time before you can go to a box store to buy one.

On Friday, I listened to Nigel Dunnett and Rosemary Coyne speak about projects in Sheffield and Birmingham both in the UK. Both cities have an industrial past, which gives hope for urban renewal and greening for Southeast Michigan and Detroit. In between Nigel and Rosemary’s presentations, Sandra Marshall spoke about policies encouraging green roofs from around the world. The policies focus on direct and indirect incentives but have expanded in recent years to move beyond stormwater management to include energy savings and the urban heat island effect. More information on this can be obtained from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation who funded the research for a report.

I split the afternoon session between policy and research. The policy talk by Hitesh Doshi, at Ryerson University in Toronto, quantified the benefits of green roofs at the city scale. The second talk was by Marco Schmidt, a professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology, who is investigating the use of vertical green walls on building exteriors.

Sunday morning I went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History where there is currently an exhibit on climate change and global warming. They had a nice active learning portion where you can vote your opinion on reducing US carbon emissions or funding low carbon technologies in developing countries. Additionally, they included information on how scientists take ice cores and deep ocean sediment cores to understand how the climate was thousands of years ago. However, the rest of the exhibit lacked strong and coherent evidence that the climate is changing. For the layperson or a child, much of the information would be difficult to understand. This is part of the reason why there is such a knowledge gap regarding climate change. It is difficult to present a convincing argument that is easy to understand. I look forward to seeing how well the argument is presented in the new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Thursday afternoon was spent on the policy track where I listened to two talks on life cycle assessment of green roof buildings prior to delivering my own talk on a probabilistic cost-benefit analysis of green roofs. The first life cycle assessment (LCA) talk was by Susana Saiz-Alcazar and evaluated the LCA and LCIA of an 8-story building in Madrid, Spain. It was the first time that I had seen an entire building comparison between conventional roof and green roof. The other LCA talk was by Lisa Kosareo, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. She took the approach of comparing only the roofs. She evaluated the differences in significant energy demand between a grocery store with extensive and intensive green roofs and with a conventional roof. For the conventional roof with limited insulation, much of the energy demand was in the use phase of the store. For extensive and intensive roofs, the energy demand shifted more toward the energy used in material production. After the talks, it is evident that green roofs can be integrated into an industrial ecology framework.