Cool roofs combine high solar reflectance with high infrared emittance, thereby simultaneously reducing heat gain from the sun and increasing heat removal through radiation. Radiative cooling thus offers potential for passive cooling for residential and commercial buildings. Traditional building surfaces, such as paint coatings, brick and concrete have high emittances of up to 0.96. They radiate heat into the sky to passively cool buildings at night. If made sufficiently reflective to sunlight, these materials can also achieve radiative cooling during the day.
The most common radiative coolers found on buildings are white cool-roof paint coatings, which have solar reflectances of up to 0.94, and thermal emittances of up to 0.96. The solar reflectance of the paints arises from optical scattering by the dielectric pigments embedded in the polymer paint resin, while the thermal emittance arises from the polymer resin. However, because typical white pigments like titanium dioxide and zinc oxide absorb ultraviolet radiation, the solar reflectances of paints based on such pigments do not exceed 0.95.
In 2014, researchers developed the first daytime radiative cooler using a multi-layer thermal photonic structure that selectively emits long wavelength infrared radiation into space, and can achieve 5 °C sub-ambient cooling under direct sunlight. Later researchers developed paintable porous polymer coatings, whose pores scatter sunlight to give solar reflectance of 0.96-0.99 and thermal emittance of 0.97. In experiments under direct sunlight, the coatings achieve 6 °C sub-ambient temperatures and cooling powers of 96 W/m.
Other notable radiative cooling strategies include dielectric films on metal mirrors,  and polymer or polymer composites on silver or aluminum films. Silvered polymer films with solar reflectances of 0.97 and thermal emittance of 0.96, which remain 11 °C cooler than commercial white paints under the mid-summer sun, were reported in 2015. Researchers explored designs with dielectric silicon dioxide or silicon carbide particles embedded in polymers that are translucent in the solar wavelengths and emissive in the infrared. In 2017, an example of this design with resonant polar silica microspheres randomly embedded in a polymeric matrix, was reported. The material is translucent to sunlight and has infrared emissivity of 0.93 in the infrared atmospheric transmission window. When backed with silver coating, the material achieved a midday radiative cooling power of 93 W/m under direct sunshine along with high-throughput, economical roll-to-roll manufacturing.