Recent Roundup: ARTICLES

Recent roundup: Articles

Groof will regularly seek out and reflect upon the latest content available publicly about green roofs and green walls. Check out our latest roundup of interesting news and ideas worldwide with our favourite excerpts. We hope you enjoy!

Car Dealerships and Living Walls: A Match Made in Heaven? - Greenroofs.com

• “car dealerships can be a stressful environment” for buyers and sellers alike

• “enter green walls for a stress-less environment”

• “It can clean air, absorb sound, and create feelings of calm. Looking at plants can lower stress, blood pressure, and increase attention span”

• “A living wall can also be a statement of the dealership’s commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility.”

Frontiers | Editorial: Socio-ecological dynamics of green roof ecosystems (frontiersin.org)

• “The remaining two papers continue to broaden the scope of the sociological benefits of green roofs by focusing on green roofs on urban hospitals. In their paper O’Hara et al. began by analyzing the existing literature and real-life examples of green roofs on urban hospitals. They summarize their findings by outlining the overlapping societal, economic, and environmental benefits of green roofs on urban hospitals in a Venn diagram in Figure 7. In their paper, Starry et al. identified 100 hospitals in the United States that had some sort of green roof. Their survey of hospital administrators identified patient experience and marketing as two common ways in which the green roofs were deemed successful.”

• “Given that green roofs are constructed ecosystems, they are built based on the preferences of designers and customers that choose to finance the creation of a green roof. While tax incentives and grant programs help encourage the installation of new green roofs, installation costs remain expensive and out of reach for less affluent individuals and communities. Plants are a particularly high cost, because they require propagation, installation, and regular maintenance. In their mini-review, Schrieke et al. explore these and other socio-ecological factors influencing green roof plant selection. They argue that the use of spontaneous plants, those that colonize green roofs without being sown purposefully, could deliver socio-ecological benefits such as prolonged flowering, increased biodiversity, and increased resiliency at a lower cost compared with conventional extensive green roofs planted with propagated succulents or other drought tolerant species.”

• “Characteristics of the green roof, such as size, the quality of the surrounding habitat, and plant selection contribute to the quality and degree of ecological benefits of the green roof ecosystems.”

• “The first known appearance of a green roof was in Ziggurat of Ancient Mesopotamia (circa 4000 BC). Later, turf walls and roofs were essential elements used during the Viking era (circa AD 800) to insulate buildings during winter. By 1982 the first green roof building standards were established in Germany and public policy began to incentivize or require the construction of green roofs. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s more research on green roofs began to emerge focusing on plant and growing media selection, stormwater management, and insulation capacity. In 2007 the first major review on green roofs was published (Oberndorfer et al., 2007), which called for a broadened research agenda focusing on a range of ecosystem services.”

(99+) Boosting Your Real Estate Portfolio ESG Score with Green Walls and Green Roofs | LinkedIn

• “100% of respondents from Asia, 90% in North America and 85% in Europe expressed current demand for healthy buildings as moderate or strong”

• “Also note - not only are green roofs a healthy building strategy for building occupants, but they also protect your physical building asset, protecting roof membranes and enabling them to last 40 to 60 years longer than a roof membrane not protected by green roof layers.”

• “Also note - not only are green roofs a healthy building strategy for building occupants, but they also protect your physical building asset, protecting roof membranes and enabling them to last 40 to 60 years longer than a roof membrane not protected by green roof layers.”

• “Certain plants have the ability to remove harmful particulate matter from the air, including but not limited to benzene, formaldehyde, and ammonia.”