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| Image Credit: Columbia University |
The ability to stop overflows of course stems from the fact that green roofs retain water and thus prevent said water from simply flowing into the sewers.
As an example, the green roof on top of the Con Edison building in Long Island City, Queens (investigated by the researchers) — home to around 21,000 plants — retains roughly 30% of the rainwater (on a quarter acre) that falls on it. That’s a pretty significant amount of water.
The press release from Columbia University provides more:
If New York City’s 1 billion square feet of roofs were transformed into green roofs, it would be possible to keep more than 10 billion gallons of water a year out of the city sewer system, according to the study led by Stuart Gaffin, research scientist at Columbia’s Center for Climate Systems Research.
New York City, like other older urban centers, has a combined sewer
system that carries storm water and wastewater. The system often reaches
capacity during rains and must discharge a mix of storm water and
sewage into New York Harbor, the Hudson River, the East River and other
waterways.
Previous to these new findings, the researchers had already determined that the green and white roofs were quite effective at reducing energy costs and, also, urban air temperatures.
“The information we are collecting from Con Edison’s roofs is invaluable in helping us determine the costs and benefits of green infrastructure projects,” Gaffin stated. “Without solid data from experiments like this, it is impossible for us to know which projects are the best options for protecting the environment.”
When you take into account the cost of building and maintaining a green roof, the cost of capturing rainwater works out to about 2 cents a year to capture each gallon of water.
We’ve also reported previously that green roofs and solar panels are a great fit. Green roofs help to keep the solar panels cooler, which boosts their efficiency. For more on that, see one or all of these three stories:
Green Roofs Pave the Way to Cheap Solar Power
Green Roofs & Solar Panels: The Future of Renewable Energy?
Green Roofs Boost Solar Panel Performance
In related news, a similar “simple” solution to the management of high urban temperatures was recently put forward as a solution in Australia — white roads. While the concept of using white roads to reflect light and thereby reduce temperatures is certainly nothing new, it hasn’t yet been applied on a truly large scale, something that the Cool Change Cities Project is setting out to do.
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This article was written by James Ayre via Clean Technica.
