Green Infrastructure

GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE can be divided in:

• sports fields in clay and green grass, both natural and synthetic
• green car parking areas
• green roofs and hanging gardens
• ornamental meadows

The choice of the ideal substrate for construction or maintenance of one or other type of green surface is based on technical and economical considerations.

All in all, the above mentioned green areas must have some common properties because their surfaces have to contemporaneously be:

• DRAINING: this property is granted only through use of inert materials such as , river or quarry sand and/or gravel of different grain size and nature, placed in accordance to adequate layers. The agrarian ground has in fact enough draining properties, especially in those applications where the continuous passing of cars or people, is amassing the surface making it completely waterproof.

• CARRYING: the use of the area by more or less heavy means is imposing that the surface is realized with substrates having carrying and stable properties. The ground or the common peaty potting soils don’t have these characteristics, especially during the long raining periods, when they adopt plastic and deforming properties, therefore the inert materials like sand and gravels, also in this case have to be preferred.

• FRUITFUL: they have to be able to grant the presence of water, gaseous oxygen, nutritional elements and the possibility of developing organic substances. Sand and gravels don’t have this properties, which are peculiar characteristic of good grounds or peaty potting soil.

The inert volcanic materials, used with simple and adequate constructive systems are granting, contemporaneously, to the surface: DRAINING, PORTANZA and FERTILITY. Those materials (pumices, lapilli, zeolites and volcanic mixtures) have the same draining properties as those inert materials from the river or the quarry and, as the last, are able to grant carrying and stability to continuous passing of cars or people.
Furthermore, due to their peculiar properties, or better due to the internal porosity of volcanic material, are constituting a fruitful substrate. The porosity of the material is granting an adequate capacity of water as well as the nutritional elements retention at any time and situation, and also the gaseous oxygen, very important for the growth and development of the roots, is granted by this material.