Application of Life Cycle Assessment Method to Compare Environmental Impacts of a Green Roof and a Normal Roof

Green roof is one of the options to improve environmental problems of urban areas. Meanwhile there are some worries about the environmental impacts of creating green roofs, as despite the benefits of vegetation, some layers of green roofs like waterproof membrane, are made from polymers. In this survey, environmental impacts of an extensive green roof in its lifetime were compared with a normal roof.
In this survey, life cycle assessment method was used. Since there are various methods to implement a green roof, first different methods of implementation and different materials that can be used in its layers were studied and collected. Then some of these methods were chosen to investigate their environmental impacts in order to find the optimized option to create a green roof. On the next step, life cycle assessment of optimized option and normal roof was conducted. The open LCA software was used to compare environmental impacts of different implementing methods, and also optimized option and normal roof.
Results showed that the green roof has less environmental impacts than normal roof, during its lifetime. In addition, it was indicated that in some impact categories that the environmental impacts of green roof was more than normal roof the reason was using PVC and geotextile (glass fiber and polyester) in its layers. Results of this paper can be improved by measuring benefits of creating a green roof (such as reducing quantity and quality of run off amounts), and also using materials with less environmental impacts in green roofs layers.