1) Sewer vents are an issue if you don’t use the proper filtration device (we call them scrubbers) to control sewer or grease odors.
2) Exhaust fan from inside the building can put a big damper on how many people will visit your top of the world garden spot.
3) A big concern also would be the cooling tower if you have one on the roof. The water in these towers can carry some serious virus or bacteria even when properly maintained. Consider a 100% chemical free water treatment system if you have a tower on your roof and use the water from the tower to water your garden. You may hear this is impossible, but we do have towers on our non-chemical system that has ZERO chemicals and the water is very clean.
4) Safety for everyone including kids & pets.

As for the comment by Reena, the only way to protect the roof top investment is to make sure you have a barrier between the roof top and whatever is on top. There are several products to do this type of protection. When installed correctly you have easy access to check on your roof o make sure everything is ok with the roof top. Keep in mind we are installing something that is designed to wear out and not your roof, so plan ahead on what you install.

Mack.

I’m a member of your group already. Just the title of it makes it a virtual home away from home.
What’s really interesting and believe me I’m not being pompous or superior when i say this…
What’s interesting is that not many people have asked questions like:

What can you do on a roof?

What does adding plants onto a building do for the building, its internal environment and services?

If doing this reduces costs for a running a business premises, how far does it need to go before you’re talking about job creation and driving the transition to a green economy?

What kind of additional services and products can be situated on a roof?

How many stakeholders in the community could benefit from plants on roofs?

What are the overlaps between integrated waste management, industrial ecology and rooftop cultivation?

What little known plants could you sell to the public if tranportation hardiness, long shelf life, slow ripening and standardization were taken as negatives rather than positives?

How many plants do we not have experience of simply because supermarkets couldn’t get the plant to fit its business model and supply chain?

How do other definitions of freshness measure up to picked 2 minutes ago?

If rooftop ecologies are processing paper, waste food, coffee grounds and other wastes what would it do to the urban waste streams?

If building occupants in apartment blocks were tending rooftop ecologies together, or giving them over to disadvantaged to manage, what would it do for community spirit and levels of criminality?
If commercial buildings were allowing local citizens to use roof space as a public private partnership what effect would this have on current CSR theory and practice?

If you and your children have a living breathing ecological machine on your roof, what will it do to your thinking?

If a city were to source half of its green vegetables, a quarter of its fruit, 20% of its meat from within the city itself what would this do to combat climate change?

These are just some of the questions my friends and I in Rooftop Ecology have discussed. I can tell you from experience we’ve gotten real enthusiastic about it.

Most wear and tear on roof surfaces is done by exposure to UV light coupled with thermal expansion and contraction. We think we could probably cut that down by a fair amount simply by using lattices to provide shade and shelter belts to cut down on wind chill.

As for water management we’re thinking of pumping the water from the drainpipe aperture into the SIPS.

I always say, “Wise men duplicate and fools create.” The entire purpose of this website is to help the regular folks deal with this entire subject. I feel so fortunate your found us. Let’s all work together. As a lifelong Property Manager (PM) I can tell you that your subject hits home. The same concept you describe can be used for an entire building!! All of the occupants can share in these concepts. Restaurants can use rooftops for food items they wish to grow, etc.

I cannot thank you enough for your profound post. We must keep in touch. Consider our LinkedIn group as well – http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=143300. I highly recommend you copy this same comment and post it for that group Discussion as well!! We may get lucky and find someone else who has “been there, done that.”

Thanks,

Linda
LDay@rooftopgarden.com

We’re a few months from moving to the experimentation stage but the idea is to incorporate decomposers into the garden and so run large amounts of organic material through a series of biological systems using the integrated farm and waste management concepts developed by George Chan of ZERI.

The idea is to run a rooftop waste management, food production and environmental services ’system’ 365 days a year. We mean to use this to generate cash flow out of savings building neighborhood cottage industries along the way. degree of self sufficiency. Moving on from this we mean to fund additional building improvements, community action programs, renewable energy, onsite sanitation-power technology etc.

In short we mean to use rooftop ecology to remake our communities, our buildings, our way of thinking so that they can become smarter, more adaptable, more resilient.
Some of the problems we are facing are.

If the system is to make money from providing systemic improvements to buildings and businesses, we will need systems and methods to quantify the improvements so that we can earn a slice of the cost reductions.

If we are to move to putting large numbers of rooftop ecologies we need a program that will give us a ballpark figure for roof load bearing so that our rooftop ecology doesn’t become a top floor ecology.

We are experimenting with ideas such as rooftop thoroughfares, concepts for using fully shaded roofs behind advertising hoardings, integrating lightweight roofs to act as supplements to load bearing roofs. Integrating passive solar water heating for lightweight greenhouses.
I’ve started a blog which touches on a lot of this, but for the most part I’m transmitting and getting zero feedback. But as you might imagine, given that what we are going where no-one has even thought of going before, we’re bound to tread on the odd banana skin.
Any assistance, vision, feedback, ideas or principles anyone here could provide would thus be gratefully appreciated.