Here is an example of a roof repair we just did. New York City has mostly flat roofs but once in a while we come across shingle slanted roofs. It is important to do shingles right because otherwise the slightest wind will blow them off again. In this case the roof was only a couple years old so it really shouldn’t be damaged already.

Eco Brooklyn doesn’t focus on specifically on shingle or tar roofs but as a green roof installer we often get involved in the roofing aspect as well. We’ve learned how important it is to do it right because once the green roof is on it is really hard to find a leak should the roof layer be installed incorrectly.

We were brought on to this job because the client is considering installing a green roof. But before we could do that we had to address the immediate issue of leaking

In this case there were two areas of concern. One was the incorectly applied shingles. The other was the area where to roof joined with the side wall. A crack had developed due to expansion and contraction of the roof. This is something that needs to be checked every couple of years and tar reapplied as needed.

The shingles were not properly applied and blew away, causing a leak down the back wall.

Where the roof met the wall a crack had developed.

We repaired the shingles by first laying tar paper under the top shingles and over the bottom shingles. We used rust proof roofing nails. We then laid new shingles starting at the bottom and working upwards. The top shingles we placed under the existing shingles. There were one or two small holes that were better served with some tar patching instead of ripping up more roof.

What the client is paying for here is that the job isn’t material and labor cost but more technical knowledge. Anybody can go up and throw materials around but the trick is to install it precisely so it that it lasts. The layering of materials is very important, all the while not damaging the exiting roof.

Another consideration for Eco Brooklyn is not to use toxic or new materials. In this case there is no question that tar shingles and tar flashing is a petro chemical product, which is far from ecological given our destructive addiction to oil. But because it is a repair of an existing roof we wanted to keep the look the same.

We did however use dunage materials. Dunage is when a package is damaged and the store either throws it out or sells it cheap. We buy dunage because it reduces the amount of materials being thrown out by stores, thus reducing the burden on the landfill.

In this case the dunage was a damaged pack of shingles and a dented can of flashing. tings that don’t effect the quality of the materials so it is perfectly acceptable to us.

Here is the repaired roof:

The new shingles were placed strategically over and under the existing shingles. The nails were placed so they are not exposed. Over time the weathering will blend the new color with the old color.

The crack along the border was sealed with flashing.

As New York green contractors we follow the latest developments in NY building codes very closely.  Yesterday, the New York City Council enacted three proposals from the Urban Green Task Force.  The new codes, effective July 1, 2012, mandate more stringent regulation of waste, recycling, and pollutant filtration, representing a step forward for green building.

Introduction 0576-2011: Treat Corrosive Concrete Wastewater

Wastewater from concrete trucks or containers  must either be treated on site or returned to the manufacturing plant for treatment.  Rinsing and wastewater containers must be located at least 30 feet from sewers.  Corrosive wastewater from construction sites may no longer be discharged into rivers or public streets.

Introduction 0578-2011: Use Recycled Asphalt

At least 10% recycled asphalt must be used in heavy duty construction applications, and at least 30% in constructing new streets and buildings.  Allowing asphalt diverted from the construction waste stream to be reintegrated into new asphalt reduces construction waste and consumption of new materials.

Introduction 0592-2011: Filter Soot from Incoming Air

Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems will be required to filter out soot and other pollutants at a rating of MERV 11 or greater, increasing the quality of indoor air by restricting the concentration of outside pollutants.

The Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value (MERV) measures performance of air purifiers treating air for entire houses or buildings.  Scores range from 1-16, and up to 20 in special applications.  Filters are rated based on the efficiency with which they remove particles of varying sizes from the air.  Purifiers rated at MERV 11 are capable of trapping auto emissions and smog, among other urban pollutants.

We’re excited to see New York moving forward with more green considerations in city-wide construction.  We pride ourselves on being the most innovative green contractor in the city, but we’re looking forward to a day when green construction practices are no longer innovative, but commonplace.

Click through for more detailed summaries of the new codes on the Urban Green website.  Search by proposal number or topic to find them.

As a New York green roof installer I have a special affection for my own green roof. Check it out after all these summer rains. It is bursting with life. I threw a couple handfuls of Native North East wildflower seeds a couple years ago and now the roof overflows with sunflowers both big and small.

This green roof installation really shows a different green roof from your typical low laying sedum roof that resembles more a desertscape. It looks more tropical than anything. But if you pick the right native plants for the mini ecoregion of your particular roof then you can expand the kinds of flora you have on a green roof.

Green Roof Installation with two bee hives

The back of the green roof has more cactus type plants

There are over thirty verities of sunflowers native to the region

The green roof has a lot of herbs. You name it, they are there.

Mint is a very happy plant on a green roof, mostly because mint grows pretty much anywhere

I always forget about the surrounding neighborhood. It is a nice view.

We just finished applying the EPDM roofing membrane to the Harlem Passive House renovation. The owners plan on growing vegetables on the roof. We like EPDM over all other roofing applications because it has a good combination of price and durability.

As part of our service in the green renovation of a brownstone Eco Brooklyn looks at the brownstone plot in its entirety. This means we don’t just gut and renovate the interior. We also look at how the interior effects the exterior. As a NY green contractor we look at the whole system, from the inside of the house, to the roof, the gardens, the block and the whole city.

The reason for this is that a Brooklyn and NY brownstone is intricately connected to all these parts. The main connection is through water, most specifically water waste and run off. Your normal brownstone is designed to remove all water (rain, toilets, showers, sinks) immediately off the property into the one sewer line. Inside the house you have your drain pipes. Outside the house you have your roof and garden drains.

This mix of clean rain water, semi clean sink and shower water (gray), and dirty toilet water (black) sometimes pass to the overworked water refining plants in the city. But often the water passes directly to the canals and rivers of NY – millions of gallons a day of toxic water polluting our water runways.

This is a problem set up by the city when they mistakenly combined their rainwater runoff and sewer lines during the construction of New York City. So all the rain water from the roofs and streets goes to the same pipes as our toilet, sink and shower water. The pipes can’t handle it all and so they have overflows into the NYC waterways.

And there is no going back now since to separate the two is too expensive.

So we at Eco Brooklyn keep this in mind when doing a NY or Brooklyn green renovation. When the budget allows we implement gray water collection, rain water collection, composting toilets, a green roof, rain gardens, dry wells in the gardens, and a tree pit in the sidewalk if there isn’t one already with a dry well under it. Basically we attempt to completely stop all water from leaving the site.

Our understanding of how a brownstone is connected to the rest of the city propels us to DISCONNECT the brownstone from the overburdened city.

Which brings us to sidewalk tree planting. If the sidewalk in front of the house does not have a tree then we file to install one. Here is an example of what that application would look like:

In our desire to reduce the city’s amount of hard surfaces and increase the amount of permeable soft surfaces we make the tree well as large as legally possible which is 13.5′x5′. The city actually likes us to go to the legal limit since it allows max space for the roots and reduces future sidewalk buckling. You can’t go much larger than 13.5×5 because emergency people like fire fighters and medics need a wide pathway from the street to the house and along the sidewalk along the front of the house.

The act of planting a tree is actually not that important in the short term. In the long term it is imperative of course. But more immediately we need to remove the concrete sidewalk and create yet another place in the brownstone ecosystem where water can pass.

Eco Brooklyn digs a lot deeper than your typical landscape company. We dig down a good six feet. We then line the bottom of the hole with root barrier and two feet of gravel. That way we have created a small dry well. Then we put the soil and tree on top of that.

We make a barely perceptible cut in the sidewalk so that water is diverted into the drywell. We also make a little cut in the curb so water from the street can pass into the well. It won’t capture all of it but it helps.

Once we prep the dry dry well we then install the tree.

When you submit an application a NYC tree inspector comes to the site and decides what tree you can plant depending on the site and the rest of the block’s character. Light, water exposure and the other trees on the block are considerations.

They pick the tree from a list of allowed trees that have been chosen for hardiness, non invasiveness of roots, non invasiveness of species, aesthetics, and size. If you look at the last two pages of NYC Tree Planting Standards (a wealth of info BTW) you will see the list of permissible trees.

One very important thing to note is that the NYC list is NOT limited to native NY trees. This is a real shame since trees that are native to our area contribute so much more biodiversity. The local animals, insects and plants have a long standing relationship with native trees. Non-native trees are much less friendly to local critters and thus are no way near as beneficial to creating a vibrant ecosystem.

So what I have done is gone through the list of allowed trees and highlighted the native ones. As reference I used the book Native Plants of the Northeast by D Leopold which is a great book. As cross reference I used the NYC Dept of Parks native and non native trees, which is also listed below:

The two lists matched up except for Shingle Oak which one listed as native and the other non (underlined in red). I believe it is native.

Here is the NYC permissible list of trees for sidewalks with the native ones highlighted.

My two favorites are the Tulip Tree and the Shingle Oak. You can’t go wrong with an oak. They live for hundreds of years and a full grown oak provides a habitat for literally thousands of animals, bugs and plants. Planting a tree is a true exercise in the Build It Forward ethos, especially with Oaks.

When you plant an Oak tree you are not planting it for yourself because it takes a good 50 years for its greatness to emerge and it doesn’t reach adulthood for a good hundred years.

Planting a tree is an act of humility in that we are acknowledging our short lived lives in the greatness of the time’s continuum. And it is a great act of selfless kindness since it is a present to future generations who we will never meet. For those two reasons alone we must plant trees.

We plant the tree as a long term investment for the planet and then let it be. It won’t be very impressive and will look like a spindly little tree for most of our lives. But we aren’t planting it for us.

Then we plant small plants and bushes for our own enjoyment. We create a beautiful little oasis on the street for bugs, animals and the occasional human to rest around. We put large river rocks that we salvage from cellar dig outs. We border the tree pit with smaller river stones to keep plants away from being stepped on by pedestrian traffic.

We just wrapped up a green roof job in East New York. Here is a photo essay from start to finish. We planted late in the year and the nights were already freezing. But we trusted the hardiness of sedum and so far they have shown to be very happy on the new roof.

The roof was your typical lifeless petrochemical slab with about six layers of tar.

The first thing we had to do was remove the tar roof. It was at the end of its life and starting to become too heavy for the house. We then built a little one foot wall around the perimer to hold the future green roof.

We had our share of nightmare weather and leaks.

We then put five layers of salvaged polyiso for a R60 roof. The materials we use is very important. We salvage as much as possible. We also didn’t want to use the conventional method of gluing the boards, which is really toxic. Below you can see a great alternative we did where we tied the insulation down with string – a very low embodied energy low toxic solution that is strong enough against the powerful winds in that area.

We then put a layer of rubber epdm, which isn’t exactly a green product but it lasts about four times longer than tar so it is pretty amazing.

The key to a green roof is that you recreate the qualities of the ground but with much less depth and much lighter.  You accentuate the drainage and water retention qualities by using drainage layers and retention layers. You keep it light by using high nutrient growing medium with a lot of light filler.

Next we put a water drainage layer. It has a mesh that makes a space for the water to drain.

We salvaged the drainage layer from Build It Green but didn’t have enough so we bought another kind from the store. This one instead of a plastic mesh it has little dimples that create space for the water to drain.

Next we put the water retention layer. We got that from our friend Atom who had some left over from her jobs. The water retention layers are like big soft blankets.

Next we laid the soil all over at 3″ depth. We used Gaia Soil. It is cool because it uses recycled Styrofoam. I have my reservations about surrounding ourselves with yet more plastic….but it is salvaging huge amounts of garbage from the dump.

Here is the staging area.

Gaia soil is so light that it easily blows away so once the soil was down we covered it with jute. Over time the jute decomposes but by then the roots are holding the soil down.

Over the jute we put an inch of organic locally made compost. This holds the jute down as well as keeps the plants healthy.

On top of all this we put mulch. The mulch holds the layers down as well as gives some protection for the plants from the harsh climate up there on the roof. It also looks very dramatic! We salvaged our mulch from a garden center that was throwing it away. A rat had made its home in the pallet of mulch and they couldn’t sell it. I saw the rat as I was carting the bags away. I apologized for taking his home. Notice the gnaw holes in the bags.

Finally we bring the plants. We got our plants from two places. The first is a garden center that was throwing plants away because they had become too ugly for customers to buy. We don’t mind ugly. We love all plants even the ugly ones. We let the plants sit over the summer in a very hot and dry environment because we had no other place to put them. Because they were not your typical green roof sedum it was a great test to see which ones can handle a hot and dry green roof. Here they are when we got them.

The other plants are your typical sedum. We buy them from a local psychiatric center whose patients grow plants as part of their therapy. An employee approached Eco Brooklyn asking if we would be willing to buy the plants. Management is trying to cut funding for the gardening program but if it makes money they agreed not to cut it. It is very warped. These poor mental patients have to prove their therapy is making a profit in order to get funding. We gladly buy the plants.

We lay the plants out on the roof and then insert the plugs into the growing medium. Around the border of the roof we put stones we salvaged from a cellar excavation. They hold the roof layers down against strong winds.

We placed some salvaged tiles as stepping stones.

And here is the finished product one day after planting.

Some of the green roof plants we installed. They are just little plugs now but will eventually cover the whole roof with a lush green cover:

Here is the green roof drain, again all salvaged materials:

As New York green roof installers with a passion for pushing green building to higher level the ingredients of a green roof are just as important to us as the end result. It is great that it is a green roof. It is also great that the soil, the mats, the plants and various other things are salvaged and recycled content, thus reversing the landfill waste and reducing consumption of new resources.

It is great that the workers were there for more than a paycheck. They loved and enjoyed the process and were proud of their accomplishment. Also great is that it is for a very modest income client. It is important to us that green building be accessible to middle income people. That is how we will make the most significant positive impact.

This is the magic of holistic building. All the parts are equally important and supportive of the whole.