Edith de Guzman in Bloomberg — The Problem With ‘Cool Pavements’: They Make People Hot

A tool to help solve the problem of urban heat islands could have an unwelcome side effect, new research in L.A. finds. 

From a managerial perspective, cool pavements offer plenty of benefits. The material is relatively cheap—CoolSeal costs around 30 to 40 cents per square foot, and less in larger quantities. The maintenance, though significant due to traffic eroding their reflectiveness, is predictable.

“There’s an attractiveness and a neatness to creating a program like that,” says Edith de Guzman, the research director at TreePeople, a Los Angeles-based environmental nonprofit.