April 20, 2015 NEWS RELEASE
Living Walls…With Help from Plastics
Toronto, ON, April 20, 2015 - If you have an interest in home gardening or landscape design, you’ve likely heard of “living walls”—indoor or outdoor vertical gardens filled with plants, flowers, and even edible herbs and vegetables. Grown in containers and fastened to the walls of buildings or other structures, these walls bring living and breathing greenery into areas where horizontal space for traditional gardening is limited.
While they are trendy today, vertical gardening on walls has been around for centuries and was more recently popularizedin the 1930s, partly as a way to reconnect city dwellers with nature. Living walls have evolved since then, and today plastics make it easier than ever to create beautiful walls of foliage in and around our homes.
A living wall typically begins with multiple planters that must fasten securely to walls while holding plants, soil, and water. Because plastics are both lightweight and strong, they’re often the material of choice for planters used in living walls of all sizes. These benefits of plastics don’t merely create aesthetically pleasing design features—living walls made with plastics can help us lighten our environmental footprint.
Here are some examples:
· Water Conservation:Plastics enable planter design features that can make iteasier to waterliving walls with less—helping plants thrive with minimal water use. This is because some plastic planters use built-in reservoirs that conserve water by enabling precise watering while others use easy-to-installplastic drip irrigationsystems to help make sure plants receive only the amount of water they need.
· Energy Efficiency:Living walls can helpreduce the surrounding air temperaturein urban environments—and this same principle may help improve energy efficiency in a home. One major living wall design company says that installing a large living wall in the interior of a home can help decrease air temperature, potentiallyreducing electricity useby 20 percent.
· Recycling:Some companies that manufacture vertical gardening equipment now use recycled plastics to make their products. It’s easier than ever to find rigid planters made with recycled polypropyleneplastic (the type used for yogurt and margarine containers), as well as fabric planters made withrecycled PETplastic from beverage bottles. Seeking out these and other recycled plastic products helps divert used plastics from landfills.
Due to these environmental benefits, many designers now incorporate living walls into the interior or exterior plans for new buildings. In fact,living wallspotentially can help earn credits in LEED® Canada for Homes certification categories—such as Water Efficiency and Energy & Atmosphere—while beautifying the spaces in which we live and work.
Today's intelligent plastics are vital to the modern world. These materials enhance our lifestyles, our economy and the environment. For more information visit www.intelligentplastics.ca.
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For More Information:
Darlene Gray, Canadian Plastics Industry Association
905.678.7748 ext. 239