Originally published on Sydney Morning Herald by Emma Koehn, 24 June 2019
Manly Vale car park
Last year Jock Gammon added “breathing” walls to a concrete carpark and now he has his his sights set on freshening up freeways across the country.
“We’re in a pretty exciting industry, because most of the projects have never been done before. Our ethos is about innovation and creativity,” the co-founder of Sydney startup Junglefy says.
Junglefy adds greenery installations to buildings and public spaces and has been involved in high-profile projects including the greenery walls at Sydney’s One Central Park.
The business is now partnering with the University of Technology Sydney to develop “breathing walls”, plant banks designed to withstand pollution and help improve air quality.
Last month the New South Wales government chipped in $100,000 in grant funding to test the greenery walls along the M2 and Eastern Distributor roads, in a partnership with Transurban.
Eastern Distributor motorway
It’s a project the business believes could be the first of many.
Gammon and his wife Hanna launched Junglefy in 2009, inspired to change urban locations after “having three young boys and seeing where the state of our cities are going”.
These days the company is running 12 separate projects at once and turning over $7.5 million.
It’s a sector the team have seen bloom as higher density living and apartment projects have sprung up across the nation.
One of the biggest challenges in the face of this demand is persuading clients that green installations need to be taken care of.
“We’ve had projects where the client didn’t want to spend money on irrigation: they were relying on tenants to water the plants,” Gammon says.
“But people are poor on time at the best of times.”
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