Green roof solutions makes it big in budapest

Costing £500,000 Euros, one of Europe’s largest green roofs, at 23,800 square metres, has just been installed in Budapest – in an astonishingly quick four weeks. Covering the Hungarian capital’s new waste water cleansing plant, it features the popular Diadem green roofing system.

Funded by a range of investors across Hungary and the European Union, green construction was at the top of the agenda for the facility’s owners, the Municipality of Budapest. For this reason, it chose to cap the much needed water processing plant with a state of the art green roof packed with environmentally friendly features.

Building the huge roof required the ingenious use of the most advanced building materials. The substrate of the roof was constructed using a Weiss+Appetitio Power Jumbo. This astonishing pumping system shoots bonding agents and gravel from a crane mounted arm onto flooring, making for an amazingly quick application of substrate for the time-stretched project.

Onto this was laid the ingenious Diadem green roofing. It was the perfect match for the aims of the green project, because as many of its components as possible are sourced from recycled materials and it avoids the use of harmful plasticisers alongside the conventional benefits of green roofing.

Diadem offers a complete green roofing solution. Comprising of every component needed to complete a roof to any requirement, from domestic projects up to schemes the size of the Budapest water processing facility, it can be tailored to any scheme. The Budapest project required an extensive range and amount of materials, from over 1.2 kilometres of irrigation piping to over 22,000 square metres of drainage board, making the project especially remarkable.

The roof garden will benefit the inner city environment of Budapest in many ways. The rooftop is a 19,220 square metre mix of intensive and extensive planting, installed in a record breaking two weeks. It ranges from trees and shrubs down to the grasses and herbs, providing a habitat for many creatures. Whilst any green roof is a godsend to biodiversity, the size of this roof will have an especially beneficial effect on the insect, animal and bird life of the local area.

As well as the greenery of the roof playing an essential role in converting harmful carbon back into oxygen, the rooftop reduces the facility’s carbon footprint in other ways. As the earth roof cools the building in the summer and insulates it in winter, keeping it warm, it reduces the amount of energy the building needs for temperature control. As heating and air conditioning needs represent a majority of the energy that buildings require to function, this represents a considerable advantage for the environment.

The roofing membrane also plays a role in reducing the harmful runoff of rainwater. Normally diverted to drainage, such water represents a considerable threat to the environment. Not only responsible for a great deal of flooding, a grave concern for a riverside city such as Budapest, but water returning to the ground via drainage is very often contaminated en route, proving harmful to plant and animal life. The earth on the Diadem roof garden will absorb rainwater, using it to nourish plants.

At such great expense and performing such a crucial task for Budapest, it was essential that the facility was well protected. The green roofing solution will prove more than a match for this task. By keeping water and sun off of the roofing substrate and, through providing insulation, protect it from the effects of thermal shock, the structure of the roof will remain its integrity for years beyond the amount it would was it left uncovered.