Is that a daisy growing on your roof?

In the first stage of its Green Rooftops initiative, the city of Chicago is constructing a 33,000-square-foot ecoroof on City Hall. It will hold more than 150,000 plants of many species, including wild onion, butterfly weed, aster, and buffalo grass, all hardy enough for the Illinois climate.

The city's environment department is closely monitoring the progress of this project. It has installed rooftop weather stations to keep track of temperature, wind speed, and rainfall, as well as bird and butterfly populations in order to fully understand the impact of green roofs.

Constructing ecoroofs can entail more work than conventional roofs. The roofs must be able to hold 10 to 25 pounds per square foot more than conventional roofs. The extra weight might require additional roof trusses, joists, columns, or other structures.

Underneath the soil is a waterproof membrane - a layer of modified asphalt, synthetic rubber, or reinforced PVC piping - that blocks water and keeps roots from affecting the roof's underlying surface.

A drain system must be provided because there will be some water runoff, although it's much less than with a conventional roof. Ecoroofs can handle snow and ice conditions, provided the buildings are structurally sound enough to handle both the weight of the plants and the snow load.

Besides snow, there are several other drawbacks to ecoroofs. In climates less rainy than Portland's there may concerns about the vegetation drying during the summer and becoming a fire hazard. If that's a possibility, owners may want to water the roof during dry spells.

Another obstacle is the potential for increased maintenance, depending on the plant material chosen. The roof drains should be inspected occasionally throughout the year to ensure that they are not plugged up.

The extra materials and construction increase the cost of a green roof to $10 to $15 a square foot, compared with $3 to $9 a square foot for a conventional roof. Although the cost of green roofs is higher, they last twice as long as regular ones: 40 years compared to 20 years, according to Liptan.

They can also eliminate the need for expensive retaining ponds, which many local laws require developers to create to handle storm-water runoff.

It is the cost factor, however, that keeps US construction of ecoroofs lagging behind what's happening in Europe.

The additional cost is the reason that some US cities like Portland offer financial incentives such as grants and tax breaks for ecoroof construction. "The city also gives developers credit for storm-water management if they have an ecoroof," says Liptan.

But in other American cities some consumers may be willing to pay the extra costs of green construction themselves. According to Cahners Residential Group, an industry trade publisher, eight out of 10 homeowners and builders that the company surveyed in 2002 said that new homes do not meet their demands in sustaining the environment, up from six in 10 in 2001.

The survey also found that compared with the previous year, consumers don't mind the extra cost for green features and that they want to be part of a total community environmental solution. Ecoroofs are beginning to gain a reputation as being part of that total community environmental solution.

ButLiptan believes that the best part is that ecoroofs are alive. "There are billions of living organisms [on the roofs]," he says, "all working to protect the building and provide nourishment to many birds and insects. They look great, too."

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