Life Cycle Assessment of Green Roofs: A Review on the Current Research

Abstract

Recently, air and water pollution were the hottest topics around the world, leading to air and stormwater quality problems in urban areas. Therefore, the installation of the green roofs could be a suitable option to address the above issues and to promote sustainability in urban areas. Recently, to evaluate if the green roofs are superiors than the other roofs types, the life cycle assessment approach performed. The life cycle assessment has been applied to evaluate the environmental, social and economic benefits of various roofs types. The paper is intended to give an overview of green roof technology and show the current studies of life cycle assessment that compare the environmental performance of green roof with other roof types. Through the literature results, it was found that the green roofs are the sustainable practices to protect environment as well as to reduce CO2 emission on the long term basis. However, there is a still need to find out the more environmental friendly materials to optimize the green roof benefits. In the analysis of life cycle assessment result, there a high need provides specific and accurate data to estimate the more consistent results which will lead to a real estimation of the environmental impacts caused by the green roof. Life cycle assessment approach is essential to provide useful information to stakeholders and decision makers to adopt green roof projects around the world.