Innovation at rooflite: Listening to the Green Roof Community
Posted in Blog, Create With Us, green roof on October 4, 2017
At rooflite, we embrace innovation and make it an integral part of our daily work. We are always striving to be better at our jobs and improve how we develop, test, produce and ship our rooflite soil products.
We’ve developed a number of innovative methods from our blender network and material sourcing, propriety soil mixes, media compaction testing, and logistics capabilities, just to name a few. We believe we have an obligation to give the green roof industry the best growth media possible, and we make innovation and improvement part of what we do every day.
We also value our green roof partners in pushing us to develop new products to meet their needs in designing and installing green roofs. As the green roof industry has matured in North America, the desire for new types of green roof installations has required us to innovate in both the products we offer and how we offer them. We are always up for the challenge, and we are happy to get input from the green roof community to help us all achieve the goal of greening our cities.
One of our more recent innovations is soil systems. Because green roofs are a cross-discipline effort with many specialties involved in a project, we made a decision to create fully formed soil systems, where we outline everything from the membrane up, including the drainage layer, filter fabric, and soil profiles for 10 different applications on-structure. These 10 soil systems span everything from the shallowest, lightest weight green roof to the deepest, most intensive rooftop garden. Our soil systems, which include specifications and drawings, make it possible for a specifier to call out exactly what they need and installers to buy exactly what they need. It streamlines the process to make the whole soil selection process easier.
The green roof design community is always coming up with more demanding designs with a need for deeper systems to support different plants, and we’ve had to respond to this need by creating a product: rooflite intensive base. This product is an underlying layer that mimics and improves upon natural soil horizons while also being lightweight and free draining. Offering this product has allowed design professionals to install to greater depths with more freedom and flexibility in plant palette. We’ve also focused on creating extra-light blends, offering our products in more lightweight options, giving green roof professionals the opportunity to install in more places.
Rooftop farming is a big trend in urban areas. Many cities are embracing this movement in an effort to bring the fresh food supply closer to urban residents for both environmental and quality-of-life reasons. And while we always the ability to increase organic matter content in our soils and optimize our products for specific applications, we created our rooflite agricultural product in direct response to requests from design professionals wanting to tackle farming on rooftops in cities. We’ve loved to see our rooftop farming projects thrive and grow and bring food and farming knowledge to the communities they serve.
We want to say thanks to the green roof professionals who give us valuable input to help us improve our offerings and innovate every day. We’re always impressed by the creativity in this community, and we know new challenges are just around the corner. We look forward to taking them on. You can expect us to continue our commitment to bringing you the highest quality products.
