School Receives Makeover With Living Green Walls

The Leckie Elementary School in D.C. receives a green makeover. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Center for Green Schools arranged for Suite Plants to donate eight of their LiveFence living green walls to Leckie Elementary School. Students, teachers, staff and volunteers came together for a community build project to construct custom rolling wooden planter boxes for the green walls.

The Suite Plants ivy plant walls had been used a few weeks earlier as decoration in an education room at USGBC’s Greenbuild International Conference & Expo. Instead of shipping the LiveFence walls back to the company’s greenhouse, and thereby increasing the carbon footprint, a more green solution was to find a local home.

Leckie Elementary School Principal Atasha James explains, “Installing the living walls brings life and better air into our school. They improve the sterile and industrial learning environment at Leckie.”

Living walls act as a natural air purification system by filtering out airborne contaminants, pumping out oxygen to revitalize the air and even regulating humidity levels, which has been shown to reduce the effects of the flu. Numerous studies have demonstrated that living walls have an overwhelmingly positive effect on building occupants by increasing productivity, improving air quality, reducing stress levels, improving cognitive function and even increasing creativity.

The ivy plant walls create a warm and welcoming environment in the school and connect students with nature. This Biophilic design concept, that humans crave a connection to nature and perform better when surrounded by natural elements that mimic the outdoor environment, has been incorporated into a growing number of buildings for leading organizations, such as the living wall installations at Google and Whole Foods.