Green roofs
Screw solar panels. For a much greater and more immediate impact on your energy use, you should really take a look at rooftop vegetation. I recently saw the list of benefits at the magnificent Denver Botanic Gardens and haven’t been able to stop thinking about how perfect green roofs are.
Among the many benefits:
- Reduce cooling costs by 50-90%
- Reduce heating costs
- Lower carbon emissions
- Mitigate the “heat island” effect found in urban areas
- Reduce stormwater run-off
- Natural habitat creation
- Filter pollutants out of the air, which lowers diseases such as asthma
- Filter pollutants and heavy metals out of rainwater
- Help to insulate a building for sound
- Agricultural space
- Increase lifespan of the roof
- Increase real estate value
Sure, they take a little maintenance, but the return on that investment would be huge. If anybody out there is looking for a new career path, I would highly suggest getting into green roofs. As global temperatures continue to rise, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be building these on just about every roof in every city in the world.
(Images via Greenroofs.com)
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