Urban Survivalists

So we went to the Eco Roof Vendor Fair in Portland Oregon this Saturday. We realise that many of you are not able to attend simply because you don’t live in Portland, but that shouldn’t stop you from having the resources from the fair at your fingertips. That’s what we are here for. So we are going to give you the best resources we found at the fair.

Links geared toward Portland residents:

1. ReDirect Guide, This site gives sustainable living business directories and resources out for the Portland, Vancouver, Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Greater Salt Lake, and Park city areas. The best part is that it is free.
2. Eco Roof Grant for home owners provided by the city of Portland
3. Cascadia, green building advocacy group, not just for Portland residents
4. Home Builders Association, and for those of you not in Portland, see this.
5. Energy Trust, helping homes identify their energy usage needs. Learn about the energy performance score.

The Eco Roof Vendors are going in a few categories, the first being plant providers:

1. Northwest Horticulture, is a nursery that provides green roof plants toir clients. While the offered to let us take one of their example plants home, we had to decline since it would most likely die in our care
2. Sunmark Seeds had a really good product catalogue in paper format, but I think they are in the process of revamping their site. So I’m sure they would be more than happy to send you one if you called them. Their catalogue lists the type of plant, conditions it likes and prices.
3. GreenFeathers is a company that makes live roof pre-vegetated modules. They were cool in that all you had to do was plop them on your roof since the trays took care of the drainage and the plants were already there.

Next up we are going to list off the soil providers present:

1. Pro-Gro Mixes & Materials offered soil blends for almost any kind of plant you wanted to have and at any depth of soil.They had numerous samples on site and so we got to play in the dirt… YAY!
2. Sunmark Environmental offered some soil mixes that incorporated reused coffee bags from coffee store chains.
3. rooflite was the only certified green roof media that we found. They are certified through FLL. Good luck reading that site if you don’t read German. Apparently, Germany has been doing green roofs for over 30yrs and already has a certification process for the growing media.
4. Phillips Soils Products, Inc. was also a vendor that provided soil media for green roofs. They also offer plants, so this could be a one stop shop place for you.

Irrigation products for green roofs:

1. SES Kisss provided irrigation lines for green roofs. This wouls optimize the water usage of the roof for the plants.

Complete eco roof systems:

1. Soprema, combines waterproofing and plants on one roof.
2. Columbia Green Technologies, Inc. had a cool system that installed the plants in nifty trays.
3. Diadem provided another resource for complete green roof systems.

Architects, structural engineers, design consultants, and landscapers who want to help you design your green roof:

1. Suzanne Zuniga Architect, she has a free eco roof guide on the specificatons link to her site.She is also a very nice lady!
2. Tremco Roofing, sustainable green roofing
3. EcoRoofs Everywhere, Portland based
4. McDonald & Wetle, Inc. Roofing and Sheet Metal Contractors
5. Snyder Roofing, commercial & industrial roofing
6. Lando and Associates, landscape architecture
7. Ankron Moison Architects
8. Habitats, ecological planning and landscape.
9. Pacific Landscape Management
10. Cascade Design Professionals, Inc. structural design & analysis for residential & commercial.
11. Manning Design & Construction, reconstruct / remodel
12. enviroscapees nw, green roofs and living walls
13. Teufel Landscape
14. ZinCo Canada, Inc. these guys were very knowledgeable when we talked to them.

But what really made the trip worth while was the green roof demonstration build. They decided that it would be a good idea to put a green roof on a chicken coop to demonstrate how easy they are to build and show off the types of plants. This was cool since Stan and I got to help plant the roof. Check out the video below to see the build progress.

The chicken coop is provided by moderncoop.

That’s it for this week

P&S