No one with a kid in the house these days gets away with being anything less than environmentally aware. Mark Bishar, vice president of marketing at Big George's Home Appliance Mart, Ann Arbor, Mich., has two kids at home and is already feeling eco-pressure.
"My 4-year-old says one day, 'Dad, will you save the earth for me?'" Bishar recalled. "I don't know where he gets this stuff. But frankly I do think it's been a disaster, what we've done to the planet for the last 20 years."
Bishar could have answered his pint-sized activist with a pledge to pick up litter or put a couple motion sensors on the porch lights. Instead, he has spent the last few of years designing and implementing a more involved strategy. Along with his business co-owners, his brother, Ramsey, and his father, Bud, Mark has turned a recent new store construction into an opportunity to try out one of the more progressive "sustainable" ideas in retail store design today. Just like the new Apple Store in Chicago, the new Big George's features what's called a "green roof."
"It added another 10 percent to the project, but I love the whole concept," Mark said, "and I love the response we're getting from our customers about it."
The green roof is a simple idea, but one that includes a variety of practical and symbolic benefits. Instead of topping the 20,000-square-foot store with traditional roofing materials and drain pipes, the Bishars hired an architect to design both a patio and what at first appears to be a sort of large plant nursery.
"What we have, actually, are [hundreds of] 2-by-4 trays of soil which hold native plants that grow in the Michigan climate automatically.
They're basically pretty weeds. Some even have flowers," Mark said. "The plants keep the soil intact, along with recycled clay particles, which keep the soil from blowing out of the trays when it gets windy."
Those 4-inch-deep trays make up what could be called an artificial field and are excellent at retaining rainwater. That mean Big George's isn't dumping gallons of runoff into city sewers. And on bright or hot days, the moist sod reflects sunlight instead of absorbing it, thereby keeping the building far cooler than a sizzling black or silver roof would. The effect, essentially, is an extra four inches of insulation that's actually nice to look at.
