Abstract
Recent years have seen an increase in the amount of green
roofs in urban areas across the world. The research to
date has tended to focus on the general advantages of
such roofs while less attention has been paid to
environmental impacts of the layers used in the
construction of green roofs. In this paper, the
environmental performance of two complete lightweight
green roof systems were analyzed with the aim of
determining the potential environmental impact of the
different layers of the systems. The results show that
among the materials we analyzed, the water retention,
drainage and substrate layers contained the components
that had the greatest negative environmental impact. More
specifically, our results show that when the required
performance is not impaired 1) Rockwool, virgin HIPS and
expanded clay should be avoided in order to produce
environmentally responsible roof systems; 2) simple roof
systems may be recommendable whenever feasible and 3)
recycled and local materials are better than virgin and
those requiring long distance transport; and 4) the use
of compost on the roofs may be recommendable if taking
into account that using organic waste in landfill is a
worse scenario than composting it.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 153-162 |
| Journal | Journal of Cleaner Production |
| Volume | 90 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- green roof layers
- sedum roof
- meadow roof
- environmental impact
- vegetative roofs
- LCA
