Whether the carbon emission from green roofs can be effectively mitigated by recycling waste building material as green roof substrate during five-year operation?

Green roof (GF) as an important role of urban ecosystem services is more and more focused on carbon sequestration for the mitigation of climate change, which there is still a gap of longer period of investigation on carbon sequestration on GF. This work aims to quantify the carbon sequestration on green roofs from 2012 to 2017 by measuring and calculating parameter on substrate organic carbon and plant organic carbon, when using waste building material substrate (WBMS) as GF substrate for the recycling of waste solid. Green roof group 2 (waste building material substrate (WBMS) as substrate) and green roof group 1 (local natural soil (LNS) as substrate), planting same three native plants (N. auriculata, L. spicata, and L. vicaryi), were both three substrate depth of 20 cm, 25 cm, and 30 cm, respectively. Results show that both innovative WBMS and LNS were a great capability of carbon sequestration and carbon storage on green roofs. Carbon storage of green roof group 1 and green roof group 2 was 65.6 kg C m−2 and 72.6 kg C m−2, respectively. Annual mean carbon sequestration of the WBMS was 1.8 times higher than LNS. The overall average carbon sequestration (12.8 kg C m−2 year−1) in green roof group 2 using WBMS was 1.1 times than corresponding in green roof group 1 (11.4 kg C m−2 year−1 using LNS). WBMS substrate and L. vicaryi could be considered as the most adaptable green roof configuration, which can be a recommendation to promote the carbon sequestration and the function of green roof for the better urban ecosystem services. Future work may focus on the GF carbon model, water interface, long-term monitoring, environmental impact, water quality and quantity, synthesized effect on GF ecosystem, low impact development (LID), management and simulation, and combination on intelligent urban system, based on LCA.