white rooftops
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | July 28, 2011
Don’t you just love when there are easy eco-answers to un-eco situations?
For example, consider the sea of hot, black, rooftops in most cities. We’ve all heard that city living is overall much more environmentally friendly than suburban or rural living, due to the shared living of apartment buildings, less car ownership/more public transportation use, fewer lawns to maintain, etc.
But one silly matter is that the majority of apartment buildings, and many office buildings as well, are built with black roofs. While these can help heat the buildings during wintertime, they also help cook the buildings and their occupants during the summers. So everyone’s blasting their individual air-conditioning units in order to cool down from the extra heat generated by the building itself.
So thus the simple, low-tech solution: paint the rooftops white- white rooftops can deflect 70 percent more sun, and can keep the building below up to 30 degrees cooler than a traditional black roof.
Even former President Clinton’s on board: “Every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere! In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week. It’s the quickest, cheapest thing you can do.”
In NYC, “a city-backed project NYC °CoolRoofs is working with property owners to incentivize covering roofs with reflective white material. So far they’ve already coated 1.5 million square feet of roof and aim to coat one million more.”
If I could, I’d paint my rooftop tomorrow! Instead, I’ll bring it up at the next co-0p board meeting, and hope to convince my neighbors that the small expense of painting our rooftop will be more than offset by our future comfort.
What’s it like in your ‘hood- have you noticed more white rooftops springing up, or are you still surrounded by the standard tar situation?
[Image from NYC Cool Roofs]
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Yay white roofs! I’d have one, except it wouldn’t work so well for my shingled four square. If you’re interested, my company sells an easy to apply white roof product. We’ve sold to a lot of people in our city (Baltimore) and we’ll send it anywhere in the US.
http://www.conservationtechnology.com/waterproofing_acrylic.html