Athens Follows the Yellow Brick Road to Cooling Off

As all those who live in the city know, one of the major drawbacks of urban life is the high temperatures recorded in these areas during summer time.

Of course, air-conditioning can help improve your living conditions at the office and at home, but whenever one has to go out and run some errands, heat can really take its toll on his/her general well-being.

However, one city park in Athens, Greece is said to have successfully come up with a solution to this problem: by using cool materials for its roads and walkways, the overall temperature here was brought down by a considerable 12 degrees Celsius (about 53 degrees Fahrenheit).

Thus, their idea was to use special materials that have the ability to bounce back solar radiation and therefore diminish its absorption by the pavement.

Interestingly enough, by reducing outdoor temperatures, indoor ones also went down by approximately 1.9 degrees Celsius (roughly 35 degrees Fahrenheit), as buildings and other similar types of structures surrounding the park were no longer subjected to having intense heat-waves hit their walls.

As clickgreen.org reports, high officials in Athens replaced 4500 m2 (about 14,760 square feet) of the city park's asphalt or concrete pavement with a new type of pale yellow paving blocks that display incredibly high reflectivity.

Apparently, although white paving blocks were thought to have been able to do a much better job, the decision to choose their pale yellow counterparts was made so as not to disturb the eyes of local residents and tourists.

Should the use of cooling-off pavements also spread throughout the rest of the Athens, and even throughout other cities worldwide, it is quite likely that this will also help protect our planet's energy sources, given the fact that air-conditioning is most intensely used in crowded and overheated urban areas.