O’Neill Cooper, a senior at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, is passionate about the environment.
A member of the village’s Student Advisory Committee and the Youth Council for the past three years, he is leading a project in the youth council that is meant to spread awareness about Green Roofs to the Palmetto Bay and South Florida communities through a series of social media posts.
“The project is a partnership between the Palmetto Bay Youth Community Involvement Task Force (YCTIF) and Green Roof Initiative,” Cooper said. “I actually founded it myself.
I’ve always been into environmental policy, but the organization itself is the continuation of a project in a competition from the Innovate To Mitigate Project.”
He said that they are spreading the word through social media posts because focusing on short form social media proved in a first study for the competition the best and quickest way to promote “greeners” in general.
“So we promote on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram on all of our accounts, which are just under the name Greener Finishes and then alongside that we also do research and public lectures at different meetings and organizations. The last public lecture we gave was at the Palmetto Bay Gardening Club, but we’ve also given lectures at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.”
Cooper said that the message primarily is aimed at homeowners or businesses, mainly middle-aged and older adults, because of the subject matter.
“I know it’s not the most entertaining thing in the world and even with college students they don’t have that much purchasing power and they don’t have homes,” he said. “More middle-aged adults have homes that they can install things on, or maybe they own a building or have a business in a large commercial building.”
He said that so far they have gotten a good response.
“In that study we did, almost everyone said that the social media posts were one of the first interactions, if not the first interaction, they had with greeners,” Cooper said. “We did an initial survey to see what people think when they hear the words Green Roof. A lot of people thought it was painting your roof green. I thought that was good to know because we’re kind of starting from zero here.
“But almost universally we’ve gotten responses of that they’ve enjoyed the videos because of the fact that it’s actually giving them a way to get into greening without having to sit down and read some lengthy paper or watch an hour-long documentary. A 60-second video works better.”
Similar Green Roof projects in some parts of the country have prompted questions, suggesting that not all homes or business buildings are structurally sound enough to support the added weight of the plants, the moistened soil and any other materials required. Cooper doesn’t think that’s a problem in South Florida.
“When I was first getting into researching everything that was the main concern of mine, but actually especially in Florida we have really strong building codes because of all the hurricanes and there was a set of legislations in the ’80s and ’90s called the Ashra Accords which just really shored up our building codes.
“It was in response in most part to Hurricane Andrew, so most buildings in Florida built within the last 30 or 40 years are almost guaranteed to be able to support it, and even then most buildings before that are also able to support it because green roofs are not as heavy as a lot of people imagine them to be, especially greener from the smaller side of things, since they have less soil medium.”
Cooper said that the University of Miami campus has 26 buildings with green roof design. He said that they are also doing interviews with relevant professionals in the field.
The Green Roof Initiative team consists of Annika Adamo (research director), Isabella Cardozo (social media director), and Nicolas Salas (chief editor and media designer).
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