How hard would it be to design green roofs for cars? Just imagine: you stop off to pick up some groceries, and on returning to your car, you find it's alive with the sight and sound of butterflies...
How hard would it be to design green roofs for cars? Just imagine: you stop off to pick up some groceries, and on returning to your car, you find it's alive with the sight and sound of butterflies and bees tucking into the supply of nectar on its roof. Lovely.
You could tailor your green roof to your car's make and model - a retro motor like a bronze, Ford Cortina would suit a roof of dandelions, daisies and bird's foot trefoil, while a fancy new Porsche could sport a colour co-ordinated neat roll of sedum matting. You wouldn't have to spoil your paintwork - it could attach to the car like a roof rack, and you could even change it with the seasons. The challenge, of course, would be to design a green roof that wouldn't weigh anything, so as not to increase petrol consumption, and the less mud the better I suppose, if you love your car.
Seriously though, there are many ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and driving around with a load of flowers on your roof probably wouldn't cut it. Planting trees is an obvious choice: native British trees don't just absorb CO2, but provide food and shelter for wildlife. Composting helps reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill and journeys to take it there, and growing your own fruit and veg reduces food waste and food miles. Reducing, reusing and recycling gardening sundries and using sites like Freecycle result in less waste going to landfill. And then there's the peat issue. Peat bogs lock in CO2, preventing it from escaping into the earth's atmosphere, so reducing the amount of peat we use in our gardens can help preserve these habitats.
In the meantime, I'm off to patent my idea of green roofs for cars. But do you think it would work? Would you add a green roof to your car?
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