• Cool roofing consists of painting the roofs white to reflect the sun's rays and naturally lower the temperature inside the buildings.

  • It arrives in France by small touches.

  • The Toulouse-based SME Solar-Paint has developed its own reflective paint and wants to develop the process on a large scale on the roofs of industrial buildings or large surfaces.

Greener white.

The principle of cool roofing – literally cool roof – consists of using reflective paint to reflect the sun's rays and lower the temperature of buildings.

The idea is not new, not at all, since it is precisely for this purpose that the ancient Greeks whitewashed their house with white lime.

"In the United States, hundreds of Walmart stores have painted their roofs white for twenty years", also underlines Michel Rouault, the boss of the Toulouse SME Solar-Paint which is launching, right at the time when concerns about the global warming combine with those caused by the explosion in the cost of energy, its new "high-emissivity reflective paint".

Others have already bet before her on the cool roofing.

“But nobody on an industrial scale,” says the entrepreneur.

It does not target the few flat roofs of architects' houses here or there, but the "500 million square meters of roofs of industrial or commercial buildings" which culminate in France, and the boulevard of 40 million square meters to whiten nothing than in Occitania.

Up to 5°C cooler indoors without doing anything

The idea is to convince the owners of these factories, giant warehouses or supermarkets of the significant gain on the electricity bill through less use of air conditioning during the hot season.

“Our painting, which required four years of work, naturally lowers the temperature of a building by 5°C, assures Michel Rouault, and lowers energy consumption by 10 to 20%”.

He estimates, in our rather sunny latitudes where cool-roofing is much more effective than in Scandinavia, that the return on investment is "three to five years"

The new painting from Toulouse, but also from Ariégeoise since it was developed with the sector giant Maestria, is also intended to be “clean”.

It is essentially made with natural ingredients and contains additions of recycled materials, broken glass for example.

Several full-scale tests have already taken place, in particular on a large Leclerc center near Perpignan.

Toulouse logistics sites are about to go white.

Solar-Paint aims to paint 150,000 m2 of roofing by the end of the year.

Planet

COP 24: To fight against global warming, will the roofs of Paris soon all be painted white?

Planet

Australia: Faced with global warming, the roofs of future houses in this city will have to be clear

  • Planet

  • Toulouse

  • Global warming

  • energy

  • Town planning

  • Occitania