MonierLifetile, a Boral Roofing Company, has introduced “smog-eating” concrete roof tiles which they say will reduce the amount of smog in the atmosphere.

According to the company’s product brochure:

• Significantly reduces the effect of smog on the environment. Over one year, a 2000 sq ft smog eating concrete tile roof can destroy the same amount of Nitrogen Oxides as a car produces from being driven 10,800 miles.
• Made purely from minerals with an inorganic surface that withstands weather conditions.
• The tile surface does not promote organic growth such as moss and algae. Airborne pollutants are destroyed by the effect of sunlight on the catalyst and are rinsed off by rainfall. Additionally, because of the special pore structure, the concrete tiles dry out in half the time it takes ordinary tiles.

According to EcoHome via BuilderOnline [link], this technology has been used in Europe for a few years, mainly on road materials. Boral is testing it for other product offerings, including clay tiles.

The tiles will carry a price premium, an increase the company expects to come down with volume and time. Installation, performance, and weight are unchanged.

A Downer Grove, Illinois hospital is recycling the rock, roofing membrane, and insulation from their tear-off and installing a new insulated white roof.

Approximately 400 tons of river rock is will be vacuumed from the existing 52,000-square-foot fifth floor roof of the hospital’s main building. That rock will be reclaimed by construction companies for use in various projects, including roadway and other foundation work. Then 34,320 pounds of insulation and 14,000 pounds of roofing membrane will be removed and given to Nationwide Foam for recycling.

The hospital’s roofing project is expected to be complete next month with the addition of extra insulation to increase heating and cooling efficiency and topped with a natural white stone. The white roof will reduce the cooling load of the building, thus reducing their carbon footprint.

Source: Trib Local / Downer’s Grove

The idea of cool roofs and cool pavement bouncing more of the sun’s heat back into space has been around for years. It has long been known that white roofs in Greece and Spain keep buildings cooler –and help counteract against the urban heat island effect.

Until now, nobody has tried to quantify how much atmospheric cooling could be achieved. In 2004, three California energy experts started to run the numbers. At first they could not believe their eyes — they re-checked them and ran them in different ways with unambiguous results.

Every 100 square feet of roof area turned from a dark color to white is equivalent to offsetting the emission of one ton of heat-trapping, atmospheric CO2.

The study in the Climatic Change journal makes a convincing case. Scientists claim that painting urban surfaces in warm parts of the world white or a light color could offset the carbon emissions of all 600 million of the world’s cars for 18 to 20 years — at a savings equivalent to at least $1 trillion worth of CO2 reductions.

Some would like to see $3 billion of the economic stimulus package directed toward painting white or a light color as many of the nation’s roofs, and as much of its pavement, as possible — all with the goal of directing more solar radiation into space.

It must be emphasized that this plan would offset, not eliminate, the necessity of reducing carbon emissions. But as singular greenhouse mitigation strategies go — the study suggests that this strategy is elegant, simple and profoundly cheap. Not to mention job creation.

For more information:

• Heat Island Effect from the U.S. EPA.
• Is White the New Green? from Miller-McCune Online Magazine.
• Research Highlights from the study.
• Global cooling: increasing world-wide urban albedos to offset CO2 journal article.

In July of 2008, the Seattle Jobs Initiative released their Job Trends Report with a spotlight on “green jobs”. Estimates predict that investments in the green economy in Washington State could as much as quadruple the number of green jobs by the year 2020.

The industries which contain many of the blue-collar jobs going green are Construction, Manufacturing, and Utilities. The green-collar jobs are the same blue-collar jobs that have been around for decades, including roofers.

The variety of occupations and industries within the green economy is extensive. The current market demand and available workforce for green jobs is largely reflective of their traditional blue-collar counterparts. In essence, the majority of these green jobs are the existing traditional skilled trades jobs, varied only by the possibility for specialization or material use.

Blue or Green, it doesn’t matter.
A trade job for a traditional roofer and a roofer installing solar panels or solar shingles, differ only in specialized knowledge and skills. However, in terms of training and wages, the two are virtually equal from a business aspect. Some of the electrical work may have to be sub-contracted as well.

Diversity is key in any trade. As traditional roofing schemes of asphalt give way to greener alternatives, it is logical to say that one side would be shrinking. One day a roofer will be working on a shingle job in Oswego, IL. Then the next day or two, they will be doing a solar panel retrofit up the street in Batavia, IL.

It is not just the high tech solar technologies that a roofing company can expect job growth. Other technologies such as cool roofs and green roofs are making their marks.

The potential growth in green job sectors could likely be stunted by any declining labor shortage within these industries, in terms of both quantity and quality of available workers. The lack of a skilled workforce is the largest non-technical barrier to the advancement of green building technologies.

The complete report (PDF): SJI Jobs Trend Report (July 2008)

A cool roof can be defined in many ways by people or by different municipal codes. At the end of the day, however, a cool roof reflects and emits the sun’s heat back skyward without allowing it to pass into the building or home. The more sun it reflects and emits, the cooler the roof.

Rating a cool roof is done with two properties — solar reflectance and thermal emittance. Both properties are measured on a scale from 0 to 1, where 0.90 is the same as 90%. Higher values of solar reflectance & thermal emittance are considered to be cooler.

Solar reflectance is the key property for any roofing product. The higher the solar reflective value the more efficient the product is in reflecting sunlight and heat away from the building and thereby reducing roof temperature. Higher solar reflection will dramatically reduce energy bills for air conditioning in the hotter months. This can be very important in large metropolitan areas where peak loads are a concern.

Solar emittance of a material plays a lesser role and refers to its ability to release heat that is stored in the material itself. With the exception of metals, most construction materials have large emittance values of 0.85 or more. Studies have shown that high emissivity will help to reduce cooling load in warmer, sunnier climates. There is a possible connection between low emissivity and heat retention in colder climates, but more studies are needed here.

What is cool, and what is not

The Cool Roof Rating Council (CRRC) was created in 1998 to develop accurate and credible methods for evaluating & labeling solar reflectance and thermal emittance (radiative properties) of roofing products. The CRRC has an online searchable products database which is available for homeowners, contractors, service providers and other interested parties.

All CRRC testing is conducted by accredited testing laboratories. For aged ratings, product samples are exposed for three years at CRRC approved test farms. Product ratings are verified periodically through the CRRC’s Random Testing Program, which basically ensures that most products will be re-evaluated again at some point in the future.

A few words on Energy Star roofing products. Products bearing the Energy Star seal must meet a minimum initial and aged solar reflectance value. Emissivity is not currently a requirement for Energy Star qualification. The EPA is entertaining the idea of of adding an emissivity component to the Energy Star specification at some future date.

Currently Energy Star qualifications for low slope roofs must have an initial solar reflectance of at least 0.65. After 3 years, the solar reflectance must be no less than 0.50. Steep slope roofs must be 0.25 and 0.15, respectively. Both are set quite low, once you look at it.

Energy Star also requires that each company’s warranty for reflective roof products must be equal in all material respects to the product warranty offered by the same company for comparable non-reflective roof products. A company that sells only reflective roof products must offer a warranty that is equal in all material respects to the standard industry warranty for comparable non-reflective roof products.

What to look for in a cool rating

Ideally, you would want to use a roofing material that has the highest solar reflectiveness with the least depreciation of reflectivity over a 3-year period. Decreases in reflectivity will incur decreases in energy savings.

You can usually dismiss solar emittance values, unless it is deemed useful for reducing cooling load in warmer, sunnier climates. In most cases, however, there is not much difference in solar emittance between comparable product lines. Plus a majority of products tend to increase in emissivity as they age.

Energy Star qualified products, while a good place to start, is a very easy goal for manufacturers to achieve. You should research the CRRC database or individual product spec sheets to seek out higher initial & aged reflective ratings.

Research product warranties. Compare higher reflective, shorter lifespan materials against lower reflective, longer lived materials. Balance that with the cost of installing the cool roof and the energy savings you will realize over the life of the roof. You can use the Energy Star roof comparison calculator to get a rough idea of what those savings might be.

For citizens of Vancouver BC the beginning of the year brought them a landfill ban from Metro Vancouver Regional District. They were no longer able to dispose of used passenger or truck tires.

Until an unimplemented tire recycling plan is in place the tires have no place to go. To help ease the over abudancy and possibly deter illegal dumping, a Vancouver BC roofing company decided to take action with a free used tire collection service — The Big Eco Tire Toss program.

Penfolds Roofing put on a two-day door-to-door tire collection blitz
April 21st & 22nd. The successful free tire pick-up service was well recieved and they used their time to educate people on the importance of tire recycling and what types of products can be made from them.

“The fact we will arrive at their home and collect up to six used tires free of charge has generated a great response.”, said Penfolds Roofing president Ken Mayhew.

One product made from recycled tires are rubber shakes or shingles. Penfolds installs a brand of rubber shake called EcoRoof. Their literature says the eco-friendly rubber shakes are tough, practically indistructable, moss resistant, lightweight, leak proof & mostly maintenance free.

For every roof replaced with EcoRoof Rubber Shakes, 450 old tires are removed from the landfill. Annually, that’s about 20,000 tires diverted into a high-quality, lasting product.

Mayhew says that Penfolds plans to make The Big Eco Tire Toss program an annual April event.

High atop the Washington Mutual Center’s 17th floor lies a roof garden with awesome views of Seattle and Elliot Bay. The green roof serves as a vital social space and is the civic heart of the bank’s downtown campus.

Rather than meet the City of Seattle’s minimum open space requirements, the garden’s usable area was enlarged threefold to provide decks and pathways that showcase views across Elliott Bay while integrating elements that tell a story about the bank, its local origins, and the community it serves.

The roof won a ASLA 2007 Professional Jury Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

“The balance of textures is really remarkable–you lose sight of the fact that it’s on a roof. We love the reflective surface and elegant plant materials. The screen is a stroke of genius.”

An understated feature of the roof garden is how it combines usable public space for human enjoyment with many broader ecological green roof attributes, including urban heat island effect reduction, storm water retention, and native and drought-tolerant planting. This project demonstrates that sustainable landscape roof design need not be limited to extensive low-maintenance green roofs, but that it can also be practical, social, symbolic, and contemporary.

Proven Green Roof Value

Elsewhere, the ASLA wanted to know not only how much water a roof sheds but they also wanted to verify that a green roof actually worked to achieve its purposes. So, they installed one on their building in Washington, DC and monitored it for one year from July of 2006 to May of 2007.

Their green roof prevented 27,500 gallons of water from entering the Washington DCs storm drain system. As an added bonus, during summer the roof lowered air temperature at the top of the building by as much as 32 degrees when compared to a nearby tarred roof. Even in the winter the roof reduced energy costs by 10 percent through its insulative effects and summertime savings hit two to three percent.

WaMu Roof Garden Photo Pool

Over on Flickr, a photo pool of the WaMu Center Green Roof from a stunning eye-level vantage point. Breath taking photography.

Finding quality bloggers who write about the Roofing Industry is challenging. Quite frankly they are few and far between. In the past few days of searching, I have come across several that were no more than spam efforts of cut and paste jobs from a popular free article site.

In an effort to wade through the noise, we have added a new section to Roof Info which aggregates the latest posts from legitimate blogs. The Roofing Blog Feeds section is accessible via the main navigation menu item labled Feeds.

Currently we have a few roofing blogs of note. In no particular order, they are:

• Solar Shingles – A Blogspot blog dedicated to solar roofing.
• RC Columns – The syndicated Columns feed from Roofing Contractor magazine.
• RC Features – The syndicated Feature Articles feed from Roofing Contractor magazine.

More feeds will be added as they become known to us. If you know of a blog that would fit in, drop us a comment below and we will look into it.

Japanese brewer Suntory Ltd. said it had created an alternative to soil to help keep cities green. Applications include soil to cover roofs and walls for greenery — green roofs.

“This will make it possible to plant greenery on roofs and walls of buildings that have less load capacity,” said Suntory’s executive general manager Norio Kanayama.

Suitable for expanding green space in urban areas because it is lighter and more solid than soil. The soil is made of a synthetic substance, urethane.

Leafy plants growing in the synthetic soil can reduce the roof temperature by 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) — cool roofs.

Of course, there’s considerable irony in trying to save the planet by covering concrete buildings in fake plastic dirt, but then again, such a solution is about as Japanese as it gets, no? Engadget

Read the entire article, an interesting item to watch develop in the future.