Biomaterial Database

Greywater recycling in buildings using living walls and green roofs: A review of the applicability and challenges. 2019

Snigdhendubala Pradhan, and Sami G Al-Ghamdi, and Hamish R Mackey

Division of Sustainable Development, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar. Electronic address: spradhan@hbku.edu.qa.

Living walls and green roofs offer numerous benefits to densely populated urban areas such as cooling, air filtering and improved aesthetics. However, plants in these two systems are high water consumers making such systems particularly unsuitable for water-scarce arid environments most at need of passive cooling and urban greening. Integrated greywater treatment in these structures provides a possible solution, providing plants not only with water but other required nutrients and organics. However, greywater treatment by living wall and green roof systems is still lacking. This review summarizes the few studies exploring this new integrated technology and provides an in-depth analysis of existing literature on vegetated building structures and greywater treatment to reveal benefits and potential pitfalls of this technology. Appropriate selection of plants and media are essential to successful system design and must meet competing demands compared to those used in existing vegetated building structures for cooling/greening and constructed wetlands for greywater treatment. A variety of operational and user-interaction issues are also explored and will be key areas of future research to enable full-scale implementation. Integrated greywater treatment using green building vegetated structures appears a promising method for dual purpose water recycling and urban cooling, and various future research needs are emphasized to realize this.

UI	MeSH Term	Description	Entries
D010944	Plants	Multicellular, eukaryotic life forms of kingdom Plantae. Plants acquired chloroplasts by direct endosymbiosis of CYANOBACTERIA. They are characterized by a mainly photosynthetic mode of nutrition; essentially unlimited growth at localized regions of cell divisions (MERISTEMS); cellulose within cells providing rigidity; the absence of organs of locomotion; absence of nervous and sensory systems; and an alternation of haploid and diploid generations. It is a non-taxonomical term most often referring to LAND PLANTS. In broad sense it includes RHODOPHYTA and GLAUCOPHYTA along with VIRIDIPLANTAE.	Plant
D003247	Conservation of Natural Resources	The protection, preservation, restoration, and rational use of all resources in the total environment.	Carrying Capacity,Deforestation,Desertification,Environmental Protection,Natural Resources Conservation,Protection, Environmental,Capacities, Carrying,Capacity, Carrying,Carrying Capacities,Conservation, Natural Resources
D014865	Waste Disposal, Fluid	The discarding or destroying of liquid waste products or their transformation into something useful or innocuous.	Disposal, Fluid Waste,Disposals, Fluid Waste,Fluid Waste Disposal,Fluid Waste Disposals,Waste Disposals, Fluid
D014881	Water Supply	Means or process of supplying water (as for a community) usually including reservoirs, tunnels, and pipelines and often the watershed from which the water is ultimately drawn. (Webster, 3d ed)	Supplies, Water,Supply, Water,Water Supplies
D053833	Wetlands	Environments or habitats at the interface between truly terrestrial ecosystems and truly aquatic systems making them different from each yet highly dependent on both. Adaptations to low soil oxygen characterize many wetland species.	Bogs,Mangrove Forests,Mangrove Swamps,Marsh,Marshes,Swamps,Bog,Forest, Mangrove,Forests, Mangrove,Mangrove Forest,Mangrove Swamp,Swamp,Swamp, Mangrove,Swamps, Mangrove,Wetland
D059027	Recycling	The extraction and recovery of usable or valuable material from scrap or other discarded materials. (from McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, 6th ed.)