It’s time to garden. A new report out by shows that greening your roof can help the environment even more than we originally thought. For quite some time now, we’ve known that green roofs help to reduce heating and air conditioning costs, retain stormwater, and absorb carbon dioxide. Adding green to your roof though can have an even larger environmental impact – the amount of carbon absorbed exceeds original expectations. This effect can be compounded by establishing and installing more vertical gardens – greening your exterior walls.
The scientists found that replacing traditional roofing materials with ‘green’ in an urban area the size of Detroit with a population of about one-million, would be equivalent to eliminating a year’s worth of carbon dioxide emitted by 10,000 mid-sized SUVs and trucks. Their study is the first to examine the ability of green roofs to sequester carbon that may impact climate change and the findings are scheduled to appear in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Tags: environment, green roof, vertical garden