Metal Roofing in Green Building

Sustainable Building Material

Building in sustainable, energy efficient, resource saving, environmentally safe and responsible way is what green building is all about. Metal Roofing plays a major role, in sustainable design, and it is not only because metal is a sustainable roofing material made from a large percentage of recycled post consumer metal content, but also because metal is a durable and long lasting building material that can also provide significant energy savings to the building envelope, and improve not only the energy efficiency factor of the building, but the surrounding environment as well.

What is it that makes metal roofing sustainable:

Metal Roofing systems are built from metal, which is a lightweight, flexible, strong and reliable building material. It can protect the building from heat gain in by reflecting solar radiant heat back into the atmosphere. Metal is designed to last a long time and requires little to no maintenance. Metal is a widely used building material and metal construction is gaining in popularity because of the economic and environmental benefits metal has to offer.

Economic and Environmental Benefits of metal in Construction:

By keeping the building envelope cool, we can reduce the need for energy consumption required to keep the building cool, when exposed to direct sunlight, especially in the summer. By keeping the building cool, we also attain better affect on the surrounding environment by means of absence of heat island affect, which is a commonly seen phenomenon especially in the big cities where roof of the buildings gain significant heat and release that heat back into the environment making already hot cities seem even hotter and contributing to the load on power generating plants during peak hours of the day when energy consumption is necessary to keep the building cool picks up. Metal Roofing Facts

• Long lasting
• Environmentally Safe
• Made with up to 70% of post consumer contents
• Can be recycled again and again
• Sustainable Building Material
• Reduces Heat Gain
• Offers reliable protection
• Light Weight
• Can be integrated with solar roofing panels
• Considered to be a green roofing system
• Economical over long term cost breakdown

Cool color coated metal roof

Green Roofing component
Metal Roofing is considered to be a green roofing system, although it is not literally green as it is in green roof gardens for residential and certain commercial roofs. The reason why metal roofing is considered green is because it falls into the category of sustainable building materials in green building. Metal Roofs made with standing seam metal roofing can easily be upgraded to solar roofing panel laminates.

Solar Roofing panels attached Standing Seam Metal Roofing

When homeowners decide to re-roof their existing roof with a metal roofing system, they have the option to install a new roof over the existing roof, which will eliminate the need to dump the old asphalt into landfills at least in the short term, and will ensure that no extra asphalt will be dumped into the landfills from future re-roofing applications. Further, a correctly installed metal roof may well outlast the building itself!

Home and Building owners learn more about Green Building materials on http://www.newenglandmetalroof.com, from where the article has been reproduce with the kind permission.