Is it Easy Being Green? The Costs and Benefits of Green Roofs
A green roof cools your home in the summer, insulates in the winter, and has far-reaching benefits for the community, but keeping it cost-effective depends on a number of factors.
Take a look at some of the most exciting, sustainable buildings around the world, and you may notice something they have in common: green roofs, or rooftops covered with a thin layer of soil to allow for grasses and other low-lying plants to grow.
On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, author Chris Brown and his dog Katsu head to the river; the path was once a dumping ground on top of a long-defunct underground oil pipeline. The green roof was conceptualized by John Hart Asher of the Ecosystem Design Group at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin.
Photo: Dave Mead
Green roofs provide major benefits, are relatively straightforward to install, and can be added to existing buildings as well as new construction projects. However, easy installation doesn’t necessarily come cheap: depending on a variety of factors, the costs for installing a green roof can be quite high. Read on as we discuss the many advantages of green roofs and delve into some of the budgeting and cost issues that you might come across if you’re thinking of a living roof for your own home.
Green roofs are aesthetically pleasing and have multiple positive environmental benefits, even if they are small in terms of square footage. Here, a green roof blooms atop the detached garage of a home.
Photo: Morgan Rachel Levy
Although green roofs have existed for thousands of years, they’ve become increasingly popular in the past few decades as interest in sustainability has grown. As the largest horizontal surface on a typical building, roofs are vulnerable to both cold and hot temperatures, and other weather conditions. Green roofs help counteract these issues by reducing heat gains in the summer (and therefore saving money on air conditioning), increasing the thermal mass of a building, and acting as insulation during cold winter months. The significant reductions in energy bills based on these factors are usually enough to convince most home owners to install green roofs.
Architect Will Winkelman and landscape architect Todd Richardson collaborated with client JT Bullitt to design a house that blends into its surroundings in Steuben, Maine. The green roof gives the impression that "the ground just jumped onto the roof," Richardson says.
Photo: Trent Bell
See the full story on Dwell.com: Is it Easy Being Green? The Costs and Benefits of Green Roofs
