Green Roofs Are Great. Blue-Green Roofs Are Even Better

Courtesy of De Dakdokters Below that stretches a filter layer, which keeps the soil from getting into the next layer, a lightweight crate system that stores the water. And finally, below that you’ve got additional layers to keep water and plant roots from infiltrating the actual roof. “You have, in fact, a flat rain barrel …

Read more

Mexico City’s Metro System Is Sinking Fast. Yours Could Be Next

Solano‐Rojas and his colleagues found subsidence in the area of an overpass near the Olivos station, which collapsed in 2021 while a Metro train was traveling over it. “We did part of this analysis before 2021, and we detected that that area was having differential displacements,” says Solano‐Rojas. “We were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it looks …

Read more

The Next Heat Pump Frontier? NYC Apartment Windows

“There’s a massive difference in the amount of heat that our system is putting out when a user asks for heat to be comfortable versus a radiator which dumps tons of extra heat into the room,” says Vince Romanin, CEO of Gradient. “If they’re able to set that temperature on a per-room basis, not a …

Read more

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as …

Read more

Japanese Eels Found Living in Polluted River are Shining Example of Resilience

The Dotonbori River street – credit Chee Hong. CC 2.0. Running under the lights of a seemingly endless corridor of neon-lit advertising boards through a dense urban area of 2.7 million inhabitants, the Dotonbori River, was described as having the water quality of a “toilet bowl.” Yet this icon of urban Japan hides a slithery …

Read more

The City of Tomorrow Will Run on Your Toilet Water

Epic Cleantec’s soil amendment Photograph: Matt Simon Researchers are experimenting with using the same technique for wastewater solids, basically turning sludge into a solid product. “If you do pyrolysis—because it’s thermochemical, it’s a heated process—you kill these bacteria, kill these pathogens, kill these viruses. It’s much cleaner,” says engineer Fengqi You, who studies wastewater at …

Read more