Green is In

With global warming creeping in, people have made ingeneous ways to fight the battle and had slowly gone green.  No wonder sustainainability, organic,and green had become everyone’s favorite words.

This had gone from food, and now to roofs.  To be accurate this concept had been existing 50 years ago.  But it’s just during the past 15 years that this had taken off.

It’s probably because apart from it being eco-friendly, more and more people have acknowledged the other uses and benefits of having a green roof.  To enumerate a few: it gives better insulation, decreases the exposure of waterproofing  membranes, reduces the amount of storm water runoff, offers noise reduction and fire retardation, improves air quality to name a few. The list goes on and on.  So it’s definitely a no-brainer why people are slowly moving into this kind of trend.

Now people may think garden roof is also a green roof and people may have interchanged these terms once in awhile.  The main similarity is that both roof has plants on top of it. The difference boils down to its function.  Garden roof is mainly used for recreational, but green roof is used to for heat reduction.

There are 2 main types of green roof which differentiates on the kind of plants used.  First the extensive green roof is not meant for human use.  It has lesser ground depth with only 20mm to 150mm, thus its need for only ground crawling planters such as sedum.  So generally it has a lighter weight and is cheaper, which explains why it is more widely used than the other.   The 2^nd type is intensive green roof which has a minimum depth of 150mm.  This allows a wider variety of plants, but in contrast, requires more materials on drainage, and support to accommodate it.

No matter which green roof is used, it’s sure to enjoy the benefits that  were mentioned above. Many famous landmarks like The Freshwater Place in Australia, Toronto’s City Hall Podium Roof, in Canada, International School in Lyon, in France, Saint Michael’s Sustainable community in Costa Rica, have adapted it. Many countries have already joined the bandwagon, and it will just be a matter of time that the entire world would hop in too.