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Look for Portland State University students climbing on the Walmart roof, the green roof, that is. Under a two-year research partnership between the Oregon school and the retail giant, PSU is building a green roof research site on Walmart's new North Portland store.

Princeton University recently installed a green roof on a new Wawa convenience store to study the benefits and cost-effectiveness. The Wawa roof stores 79,000 gallons of rainwater to help insulate the building.

When we first heard of green roofs, they sounded like a great idea, but one that would have a hard time gaining traction. Today, they are one of the great successes of green building, with more than 10,000 green roofs in the United States.

Green roofs can save lots of money for building owners thanks to energy cost savings of up to 50%, longer life spans and financial incentives in various cities. However, a lack of awareness of green roofs' benefits may be limiting their market reach, experts say. "And I think there's been some negative information out there about the difficulty of maintaining, the cost of maintaining and the cost of installing them," said environmental adviser John-Patrick Curran. 

A company that manufactures green-roof materials in Portland, Ore., has earned recognition for exporting. The award came from the federal Small Business Administration.

The amount of energy the outdoor gear store saves through 'free cooling' is enough to power six stores for up to a year

Outdoor retailer REI is saving 1.8 million KW-h per year after installing energy-efficient cooling systems at its Seattle datacenter. The project reduced energy consumption tied to cooling by 93% and had a payback period of less than 1 year.

Levi's Stadium, the home of the National Football League's San Francisco 49ers, features an urban farm that will produce as much as 150 pounds of produce weekly. The garden encompasses 4,000 square feet of the 27,000-square-foot green roof that also has solar panels.

Sara Neff, vice president for sustainability at Kilroy Realty, says an upcoming project in San Francisco will be the real estate investment trust's most innovative sustainability project. The site "will feature a living roof, use of storm water for toilet flushing, solar panels and bricks grown from bacteria," writes Sarah Borchersen-Keto

Hotel chains and casinos are adding low-energy lighting to guest rooms, putting solar panels on roofs and using hotel limousines powered by compressed natural gas, but these sustainable practices could be bolstered by the use of third-party standards that measure hotels against one another, writes Marc Gunther. "[I]ndustry executives cite three reasons why they have begun to take action on the sustainability front: to save money, attract and motivate their employees, and respond to demand from business and leisure travelers," Gunther writes

The iPhone maker's master plan features extensive green space, aggressive water conservation and one of the largest corporate solar arrays in the world.

HVAC producers, working jointly with design professionals, are in the forefront of the war on climate change," writes Alex Carrick, chief economist for CanaData, part of Construction Market Data Group. The industry has been instrumental in helping to develop innovative plumbing, lighting, glazing and roofing products to increase sustainability, reduce water consumption and improve air quality.

Super Bowl 50 was played at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., a facility built with sustainability in mind. It has a 27,000-square-foot green roof, and more than 1,150 solar panels generate enough power for all of the San Francisco 49ers' home games. Recycled water accounts for 85% of water use for irrigation and flushing.

Existing buildings in New York will now face higher standards for the emissions of greenhouse gases by upgrading water heaters, boilers and roofs, among other changes. The goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the city by 7% by 2035.