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Environmentally-friendly grass hits the roof of Webster building Houston Business Journal - March 23, 2007 by Monica PerinHouston Business Journal A Houston landscaping company has installed the first "green" roof on a commercial building in the Houston area. It is only the third roof in the state that meets national standards for environmentally-friendly buildings. Bruce Gunderson, founder of Picture This Landscape (formerly known as Grass Hopper Inc.), designed the project for a recently completed medical office building at 251 Medical Center Blvd. in Webster. The roof is certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, Green Building Rating System, a benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings. The other two LEED building roofs in the state are located in Dallas and Austin. LEED standards evaluate site sustainability, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality. "The objective of a green roof is to make a building both eye-pleasing and energy-efficient," says Jeff Mickler, owner of Houston-based Jacob White Construction Co., which built the building and brought in Gunderson to design the roof treatment. Gunderson says the roof is covered with eight to nine inches of a special lightweight soil that costs about three times as much as regular soil and is planted with grasses that are drought-tolerant and don't have deep roots. The idea is to insulate the rooftop so the sun can't penetrate it, which helps bring down electricity bills. The grass retains water when it rains, and the property is designed to collect rainwater under the parking lot, filter it, and pump it up to the roof to irrigate the grass. Called gray water, it is also used to irrigate landscaping in the parking lots, so the property uses no city water for these purposes. The grass on the roof is bisected with walkways of lightweight lava gravel to provide access for maintaining the grass, although it does not require mowing, only weeding, Gunderson says. It is not lawn grass, but landscaping grass. The medical building roof is not intended as a public area, although some green buildings in other parts of the country, where the practice has been around longer, are designed for public use. Together with energy-efficient windows and other features, the Webster building is expected to use 65 percent less electricity than a similar conventional building. The project was the first environmental landscaping deal for Gunderson's small company, which he started in the 1980s after graduating from college with a finance degree. Because Houston's economy was in the midst of a bust at that time, Gunderson began his career by cutting lawns. Now, his company has locations in Clear Lake and Humble/Kingwood, and he is expanding into other parts of the Houston area under the new name. Gunderson believes traditional residential and commercial landscaping will likely continue to be the bulk of his business, but he expects to see a growing demand in Houston for such green projects as the Webster roof. |
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