VIZIBILITY

This is a Link to  ALIVE STRUCTURES

a company that sells products to make rooftop gardens. Rooftop gardens provide excellent energy and stormwater management improvements!

here's some excerpts from the website from a page called "WHY GET A GREEN ROOF?"

"When you get a green roof you are converting a concrete surface into a living oasis. Not only will you create an oasis for yourself but be providing badly needed natural habitat for birds, migrating butterflies, honeybees, ladybugs and other pollinators. Green Roofs can now provide up to 14 points in LEED (Leadership in Environment and Energy Design) certification. 

Green Roofs can save you money in several ways. By protecting the roof membrane from UV rays, harsh weather, and extreme temperature shifts, green roofs extend the life of you roof membrane three to four times that of a standard roof.

Research by Chicago City Hall, Penn State University, the EPA, and the NASA Goddard Institute show that green roofs can be 75 F - 100 F degrees cooler than conventional roofs during the summer. This improves the energy performance of the whole building, reducing carbon emissions, and saving you money. 

Green roofs also save you money on energy bills in the winter. They function as an insulating blanket in winter to keep heat inside the building and keep the cold air out. 

Increased market value is another financial benefit of a green roof. It is a highly visible and unique green feature which provides tenants or future owners with open green space and the knowledge that they're building is environmentally friendly.

Plants store Carbon Dioxide and release Oxygen, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore reducing a major contributor to global warming. Green roofs filter air pollution (Nitrus Oxide and Sulfur Dioxide) and air particulates that often cause respiratory ailments like asthma in children who are living in cities.

New York City's sewer system overflows every time in rains less than a quarter of an inch causing 27 billion gallons of untreated sewage and polluted stormwater into NYC waterways each year. This creates health threats to humans and animals, beach closures, fishing advisories, and habitat degradation. Green Infrastucture is the most effective and economic way to prevent stormwater run off. Green roofs act like sponges during rainfall, absorbing and detaining rainwater."

this is a great organization I've been researching called The Wild Project, a small scale theatre, film and art venue. 

SO, I ride my bike.

(This is my bike, I call her Jessica Alba...) 

I choose to ride my bike instead of drive or bus for many reasons. I have a car but I haven't driven it for six months, because I've had something wrong with my alternator.... So I RIDE MY BIKE!

So what if I had actually driven all these months, how much gas would I have used, how much money would I have spent? If I can figure this out, I can see what kind of impact riding my bike is making on my steps toward living a more sustainable lifestyle!

My house is about a mile away from where I have most of my classes and on a typical day I travel back and forth from my house to class 3 times, first i commute in the morning, then  I go home for lunch, I come back, Go home for Dinner, come back for rehearsal, then go home at the end of the night. 

I do that about 5 days a week, and then I also have rehearsal on saturdays, so that's at least 2 miles on the weekend, and lets say I also go to the Cub Foods grocery store every sunday, that's about 1.8 miles away from my house. 

That's a total of six miles a day during the week, plus about 4 miles on the weekends. thats 10 miles per week, in 6 months (because each month has about 4 weeks) I would have commuted 240 miles! 

The average car consumes 0.00025 gallons of oil every mile. 

And my car gets about 35 miles to the gallon that means in six months I would have burned about 6.8 gallons of gas (which actually doesn't seem like that much!) which would cost about (at an average price for gas per gallon at $3.68) $25.02 that's a really nice dinner at a restaurant, or a really nice bottle of booze! 

So I ride my bike! And in six months, I bike more than 240 miles! I had no Idea! Not only do I save money, and not contribute to pollution, but My legs are bangin'!  I even bike in the winter, which wasn't so hard this year thanks to the mild winter we had here in the twin cities. So everybody bike!