BLUE GREEN ROOF: PARADIGM SHIFT

WATER: FROM RISK TO OPPORTUNITY

Since the earliest times when cities were being planned, rainwater has always been considered an element that had to be disposed of and removed as quickly as possible. Nowadays, on the other hand, rainwater must be considered a resource to be used both as an element of environmental thermoregulation and as an opportunity for plant irrigation.


This change in vision necessarily leads to a rethinking of our understanding of water management and necessitates the adoption of a different approach by professionals involved in designing cities to make them socially more inclusive, ecologically less impactful, and more resilient.


Current urban water management systems, more often than not, are unable to handle violent, sudden and increasingly frequent weather phenomena due to climate change, water bombs, which increasingly overflow from disposal systems creating damage and disruption.


Water damage is the largest category of those surveyed by insurance companies and supranational bodies, suffice it to say that over the past fifty years flood and storm damage in Europe has amounted to $377 billion.

RESTARTING THE WATER CYCLE

DAKU, after a period of research and studies related to the world of Nature Based Solutions (NBS), embraced this change in vision of water cycle use and developed DAKU Blue Green Roof (BGR) technology for the purpose of making green roofs even more effective in water management and use.


The DAKU Blue Green Roof (BGR) system is characterized by its ability to collect, store and manage rainwater, but it also possesses a high degree of flexibility because it can be used in different climatic contexts and can be used both to retain and store water, in anticipation of periods of drought, and as an alternative or support to existing water disposal systems.


To ensure maximum performance DAKU has developed an IoT (Internet of Things) system that detects the amount of water stored and forecasts rainfall. If rainfall events are predicted, it verifies the possibility of retaining the total amount of incoming water and, if rainfall is greater than the capacity, it automatically discharges the excess amount of water in advance until the predicted rainfall is fully contained.


In addition, the BGR system allows for the management of the water cycle in the roof so as to enable the development of fully autonomous rooftop green solutions that improve the cooling capacity of roofs, reducing the costs associated with the supply of water for irrigation and the cooling costs of buildings, enabling various points necessary for obtaining environmental certifications, such as LEED.


Through DAKU IRRIGA, irrigation water is almost completely absorbed by the roots, limiting evaporation losses to a minimum, with the effect of significantly lowering the volumes of water used for vegetation subsistence. In addition, thanks to the increased efficiency enabled by IRRIGA, plants transpire and help to lower surface temperatures, promoting a decrease in the "heat island" phenomenon for longer periods than with conventional green roof systems irrigated with the usual sprinkler or drip systems.

DEEP SUSTAINABILITY

The Blue Green Roof and IRRIGA solutions make it possible to go beyond the concept of green roofing as only a roofing finish, making it technologically advanced and able to integrate seamlessly into the vision behind Smart Cities: technological and smart cities capable of providing useful services to simplify and improve the lives of citizens, but also capable of ensuring city development that is attentive to economic efficiency and social equity.


Daku, with its Blue Green Roof (BGR) and IRRIGA solutions, intends to make concrete its idea of sustainability urban areas, declining it into a greater attention to the environment, society and economy. In fact, to be truly sustainable, a technology must simultaneously comply with the following declinations:
Environmental Sustainability : DAKU green roof systems make it possible to optimize the consumption of water for irrigation and help lower the surface temperatures of roofs, mitigating the effects of "heat islands."
Social Sustainability : The use of innovative and technologically advanced rooftop green is an opportunity to improve the impact of building interventions in cities by making them more resilient and healthy, and consequently improve the lives of those who live in them.
Financial Sustainability : The benefits of the BGR system involve three steps: decreasing construction costs, decreasing operating costs, and increasing the market value of the building as a result. The technology therefore does not require subsidies to be a profitable investment and also considers operating costs, the focus of environmental certifications and the primary concern of building owners and managers.

WATER MANAGEMENT: A NEW FRONTIER

Realizing this new vision of sustainability for urban areas has prompted DAKU to embark on a path of innovation that has enabled it to compete in a new market, moving away from those who understand greenery as a mere roofing finish to developing the potential of vegetation used as a means to achieve a goal.


Blue Green Roof and IRRIGA solutions, in fact, are a new and innovative water management system unique to the market, in doing so DAKU has opened up a new market that offers customers a system that addresses needs that are for the most part still unexpressed, but will characterize the near future of urban area development.


To invest in Blue Green Roof and IRRIGA is to embrace a new way of looking at the future of real estate development that wants to integrate as much as possible with the cycle of nature to make our cities better by addressing problems that to date have been only minimally managed.