by Brianna Crandall — December 23, 2015—Bowling Green State University’s Office of Campus Sustainability has used a $50,000 grant from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Education Fund (OEEF) to purchase bicycle shelters featuring LiveRoof brand living roofs. These shelters were chosen to add more green space to the increasingly sustainable campus, where the Carillion Dining Center was also topped with a sustainable living roof earlier this summer.
Two bicycle shelters, located outside the Student Recreation Center and the Wolfe Center for the Arts, each provide 18-20 covered locations for students and staff to park bikes. The BGSU bicycle shelter roofs feature sedums and other succulent plants that help address two of the EPA’s priorities: managing stormwater runoff and reducing emissions.
Two bicycle shelters feature LiveRoof green roofs, each providing 18-20 covered locations for students and staff to park bikes
According to LiveRoof, green roofs provide natural function and beauty while offering aesthetic, environmental social and financial benefits, including extension of roof life, energy conservation, enhanced public relations, and conservation of municipal septic systems. These projects will also be used as educational “labs” for some of the environmental studies classes, as well as a teaching tool for the campus as a whole.
Bowling Green students voluntarily pool funds into the “Student Green Initiatives Fund” to support campus-wide sustainability projects such as the bike racks and dining hall projects. The University’s Student Green Initiatives Fund provided the percentage of matching dollars required by the OEEF grant. BGSU and The Ohio State University were the only university recipients of grants for the structures.
Darren Mayer of landscape architecture firm MKSK was chosen to design the bicycle racks, and Sustainable Green Solutions of West Chester, Ohio, to provide green roof technical and logistical support to the design and construction team.
