Tag Archives: green building

blue-green roofs in the Netherlands

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Blue-green roofs seem like a good idea.

Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures specially designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the Resilience Network of Smart Innovative Climate-Adapative Rooftops, or RESILIO, has covered over 100,000 square feet of roofs in Amsterdam, including 86,000 square feet on social housing complexes. Citywide, the blue-green roof coverage is even bigger and growing, currently estimated at over 500,000 square feet.

Wired

Making this widespread would be great, because buildings represent a large proportion of impervious surfaces in urban areas, and in the type of dense, walkable urban areas some of us think are best for people and the environment overall, there is not always enough room to deal with runoff from rooftops when it gets to the ground. So dealing with it on rooftops is great.

But alas…despite the impression that this is a new technology, it has been around for a long time and it is just not catching on in the United States. Because the construction industry in the United States is change resistant, inefficient, unproductive, and unimaginative. One could imagine this changing – there is a lot of money that could be made and a lot of jobs that could be created. More prefabricated building components is one idea that has been tossed around and around and implemented elsewhere. But decade after decade after decade, we just do not change in the United States. Call it the old American can’t do spirit.

what’s new with “passive house”?

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Well, by combining an “airtight envelope” with solar arrays, a passive house certified nursing home in Spain can actually generate more energy than it uses.

The new nursing home extension is topped with an 18 kW photovoltaic array along with 20 solar thermal panels and rooftop seating. When combined with the building’s airtight envelope, which was engineered to follow passive solar strategies, the renewable energy systems are capable of producing surplus energy, which is diverted to the old building. The Passivhaus-certified extension also includes triple glazed openings, radiant floors, rainwater harvesting and mechanical ventilation equipped with heat recovery. 

Inhabitat

So the technology exists to build like this, so why don’t we do it everywhere? Well, part of it is ignorance and resistance to adapting ideas from elsewhere to one’s own locale. A lot of it is legitimate concerns about cost. But new materials and skills can be expensive because they are in short supply locally. So, bring in a technology like this, set up local factories and training programs to build capacity, encourage entrepreneurs, provide successful examples and incentives and possibly regulations, and you can bring cost down. When the people doing it forget the old way of doing things, assume the new way is the way it has always been and the only way it can be, and are resistant to the next new idea that comes along, you have made progress.