May 12 2006
Continued summary of talks (Thursday PM)
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.