Plant-based resin for gravel and other green infrastructure marvels
Là maintenant il ne me reste plus qu’à trouver une excuse pour une virée new-yorkaise.
The other day I wrote a thing about sponge parks and some of the comments I received had to do with other ways to deal with flash floods, including permeable road or parking surfaces. About which I’m happy to enthuse herewith.
In his newsletter to constituents a few weeks ago, Knoxdale-Merivale Councillor Sean Devine said he’d received a response to an earlier inquiry on his goal to have climate-resilient infrastructure including permeable pavement like they’re doing in New York City.
I may have swooned.
Permeable surfaces are the answer to so many problems and when I asked him to expand on his mission, Devine had this to say:
I believe that every dollar spent on municipal infrastructure must also be seen as a dollar spent on climate resilience. One area I’m focused on is the use of permeable pavement in municipal infrastructure. When we build roads and parking lots with traditional asphalt, which is entirely impermeable, we need to build costly infrastructure underneath (sewers, catch basins) as part of our systems for stormwater management. But with permeable pavement, where the water seeps through the pavement and into the ground below, the road itself becomes part of the stormwater management system. And because of its permeability, it’s much more resistant to the freeze-thaw cycles that cause potholes. But that’s just some of the benefits that can be derived from this kind of innovative infrastructure.
He added that he would soon be meeting with local innovators and people using these sorts of products. Like they’re doing in North Dundas, a small rural town that’s been experimenting with a technology called “biodiffusion” to make gravel roads less of a pothole-ridden menace. It’s kind of like a resin made from natural ingredients that you mix with aggregate that’s already on the road surface to give you a better, smoother surface.
It’s just amazing what solutions people come up with when they decide to work on real problems. Like using parking lots instead of Crown land to install solar panels. In France, parking lots of a certain size must include those. And you know what’s super awesome about solar panels on parking lots? They have to live on top of a carport which creates shade for vehicles and people.
Maybe you’re like me and hadn’t realized we could radically transform parking lots into something way more useful and also vastly less unpleasant but now that you do realize it, you’re wondering why we don’t have solar panels in every single parking lot.
Le conseiller municipal Sean Devine, dans une infolettre récente, a beaucoup parlé d’infrastructures vertes. En particulier d’asphalte perméable, un revêtement conçu pour absorber l’eau. On peut appeler ça des infrastructures éponge et Montréal en a, et Laval aussi bientôt.
Quand on utilise de l’asphalte vieux genre, complètement imperméable, il faut aussi installer plein d’autres infrastructures parallèles comme des bassins de rétention, des tuyaux, des usines de traitement et tout le bazar. Quand le revêtement est perméable, l’eau de pluie passe à travers et ne contribue pas à causer des inondations qui font tellement de dégâts partout.
La plus belle initiative, cependant, c’est l’utilisation de panneaux solaires dans les stationnements. La France les rend obligatoires dans les stationnements de plus de 80 places. On commence à en voir au Canada aussi. Comptez-moi parmi les zélés nouvellement convertis parce que franchement, je ne comprends pas ce qu’on attend pour agir. Les panneaux non seulement génèrent de l’électricité mais en plus ils créent de l’ombre, ce qui contribue grandement à réduire les effets néfastes associés aux îlots de chaleur.
On s’y met, alors?