If you really want to understand how serious the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is about reducing its carbon footprint, visit the public washroom near the Bronx Zoo’s Bronxdale Gate. That’s where
I started earlier this year when I visited the zoo, not simply to enjoy its wildlife collection, but to see how an organization with an infrastructure more than a century old attempts to embrace modern green standards.

Be assured, your restroom experience will be unlike any other trip you’ve taken to an institutional lavatory. For one thing, it will be pleasant. A curving path to the flat-roofed building winds through a garden of lilies, asters, irises, and dogwoods. Inside, the room looks more like a solarium wing at a well-appointed wilderness lodge than a public convenience: slate floors, exposed wood ceiling beams, a roof made almost entirely of skylights. And in place of the infamous restroom smells, nothing: no odor, no nosetwitching disinfectants, no cloying air fresheners.

The walls are festooned with the comical, cartoonish graphics of Elwood H. Smith, who illustrated Susan H. Goldman’s popular children’s book The Truth about Poop. Puns and rhyming couplets are stenciled on almost every available square inch of wall space: “Water from this sink will be a plant’s drink,” and over the urinal, “Pees on Earth.” Below that, a short essay informs those visitors who are taking care of business that human urine is a safe alternative to chemical fertilizers and contains much more good-for-the-soil nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous. Instead of the expected roaring torrent when you flush, a couple ounces of foam trickle down the sides of the porcelain bowl.

What is going on here?
About six years ago, WCS began seriously considering the environmental impact of its future evelopments. At every conceivable venue—from exhibits, to dining facilities, right down to the bathrooms—the staff was determined to make the 265-acre Bronx Zoo one of the greenest places in New York City. “We have to meet public expectations that a wildlife conservation organization should operate in an environmentally conscious manner,” says Christine Sheppard, the zoo’s ornithology curator and head of the WCS Green Team, an unusual coalition drawn from a cross section of maintenance workers, food-service employees, curators, keepers, exhibit designers, researchers, and financial managers.

The zoo’s venerable washroom served as many as 500,000 visitors a year for about 50 years and was in need of renovation and updating. WCS officials grappled with a tough question: How could they preach preservation of the environment to visitors without first reducing the approximately 34,000 metric tons of carbon the society’s five New York City-based facilities pump into the atmosphere every year (see onservation Hotline: “Cutting Carbs,” April 2008)? As WCS President and CEO Steven E. Sanderson puts it, “We can’t be a leader in global conservation if we don’t live it at home.”

WCS could have replaced the aging Bronxdale restroom with a modern conventional one. But the new green philosophy demanded a new green approach. In late 2006, the environmentally benign Eco-Restroom replaced the old structure. The gardens fringing the rebuilt washroom are nourished by rainwater collected from the building’s roof and wastewater from its sinks. The plants’ roots biofiltrate and purify the water before returning it to the earth. Instead of connecting the plumbing to municipal sewers, the zoo installed state-of-the-art Clivus Multrum composting toilets. Urine and waste from the toilets fall into chambers beneath the restroom, where microbes convert it into harmless, odorless compost. This system uses 99 percent less water than conventional fixtures, saving one million gallons a year. A radiant heating system runs beneath the floor, delivering warmth exactly where it is needed. The skylights and bright walls eliminate the need for electric lighting during the day.

No detail is too small for consideration. The sensors that automatically activate the sinks’ faucets are powered with electricity from tiny turbines driven by flowing tap water. The Eco-Restroom not only serves as a necessary convenience, it is as much an exhibit as Tiger Mountain or the World of Birds. “I’m really proud of it,” says Susan Chin, WCS director of planning and design. “It’s a simple project—a silly little washroom, really—but through it we can connect people’s lives and daily actions not just to their locale but to the whole planet.”

A bathroom exhibiting the importance of water conservation and human waste management was nothing compared to the Lion House challenge. Built in 1903, the beautiful Beaux Arts structure in the very heart of the zoo had sat empty for two decades—too dated to house big cats in accordance with current standards, but too architecturally significant to be torn down. In 2002, the curators decided to convert the defunct building into an exhibit for the wildlife of Madagascar. This island nation off the southeastern coast of Africa is the focus of numerous WCS conservation projects, not to mention a certain animated movie.

“One of the greenest things you can do is reuse an existing structure, and the Lion House is an absolutely amazing structure. It was well worth saving,” says Chin.

The exhibit’s lemurs, fossa, frogs, and other Madagascar wildlife require a tropical climate and a constant flow of fresh air. In the dead of a New York winter, the huge building would consume enormous quantities of electricity, natural gas, and diesel fuel.

Chin and her associates had never tackled such a complicated project before. Heat came from a few lanking and hissing steam radiators. The closest thing to air conditioning: a couple of fans to blow the hot air out the ends of the building. To further complicate the engineering feat that faced the design team, the building had official New York City Landmark status, meaning that no major changes could be made to its exterior of limestone, Roman ironspot brick, and terra cotta.

But city rules don’t say anything about what’s below the building. To accommodate the necessary heating, plumbing, and electrical systems within the existing walls, the team decided to excavate the crawl space under the Lion House, deepening and extending the basement beyond the existing footprint, all the while avoiding structural damage. “When you’re taking apart a century-old building, you always encounter unexpected conditions, no matter how many core samples you’ve taken or how much probe work you’ve done,” says Chin. “Basically, we gutted the building and then levitated it. No part of the foundation touches the same ground. There were moments when I held my breath and said a few prayers.”

In late June, six years and almost $50 million later, the new exhibit will open, and Bronx Zoo visitors will be able to stroll from the formal Victorian landscaping of nearby Astor Court into strikingly realistic recreations of Madagascar’s varied landscapes. Sifaka, red-ruffed, and ring-tailed lemurs—all primitive primates—will romp over bare-rock crags and among stout trunks of baobab trees. Fossas, predatory
mammals as big as midsize dogs, will prowl a rainforest. Radiated tortoises will bask in a sandy patch of near desert. A 13-foot Nile crocodile will lurk beneath swampy waters. And thousands upon thousands
of hissing cockroaches will crawl up the rotted inside of a hollow tree.

Invisible are the hundreds of small and large steps that will not only make Madagascar! an enthralling exhibit but will also earn it the coveted LEED Gold (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating from the United States Green Building Council—the first New York City Landmark building to receive this honor. Whenever possible, recycled steel, reused “slag” concrete, and sustainably harvested wood—all low-impact materials—were used.

The building literally lives and breathes. In its subterranean depths, five wells pump water from 1,500 feet underground. The water, which remains at a stable 55 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, will be used to cool the building in summer and warm it in winter. Composed of three sandwiched layers of a plastic-like material called ethylene tetraflouroethylene (ETFE), the skylights provide nearly twice as much insulation value as normal skylights. Shading patterns on the layers adjust automatically to let in maximum
amounts of light, preventing the building from overheating in the summer and losing heat in the winter.

A fuel cell powered by natural gas allows the Lion House to generate half of its own electricity cleanly and cheaply, and waste heat from the cell satisfies 40 percent of the heating needs. Gray water from the sinks in its lavatories is filtered and reused to flush the toilets, saving nearly 150,000 gallons a year. All in all, the energy expenses of the Lion House are expected to be 57 percent less than those incurred by a comparable building meeting normal energy code standards.

Another major project in progress is the ground-up construction of the José E. Serrano Center for Global Conservation (CGC). The 40,000-square-foot, LEED Gold complex will provide space for 250 WCS employees. “Believe me, designing green systems was a lot easier with the CGC than the Lion House,” says Chin.

In addition to many of the same carbon-reducing features of the Madagascar! exhibit, the center will provide all the amenities you would expect from a brand new office building, yet it is essentially being built off of the city’s electrical grid, generating all of its power. An important green strategy for the CGC is special glass and a louvered shading structure that will minimize bird collisions (see “It’s as Clear as Day,” February 2007).

Meanwhile, Sheppard and her all-volunteer Green Team meet every two months to focus on less visible, but no less important, ways for WCS to reduce its carbon footprint. “Every time I step out of my office, someone runs up to me with their pet green project,” she says. “It would be very easy to go off in seventy-five different directions at once.” Instead, the group prioritized a list of ten areas according to what Sheppard calls, “how much green you get for your effort and cost. We started by trying to pluck the low-hanging fruit.”

In many ways, the tasks taken on by the WCS Green Team are the same commonsense measures everyone should take around their homes and offices. The zoo had been recycling paper, glass, metal, and plastic for years, but recently it added batteries, fluorescent lights, cell phones, inkjet and laser printer cartridges, walkie-talkies, and computer components, and switched to 40 percent recycled paper for its official letterhead and copy paper certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. Zoo workers are replacing conventional bulbs with energy- and money-saving compact fluorescent ones. Electrical generators are being converted from diesel to natural gas, and WCS’s fleet of vehicles is slowly switching over to alternate fuels such as electricity and natural gas.

A few years ago, Sheppard had a lunch meeting at a WCS dining room with the head of the organization’s marine conservation efforts. The daily special? Chilean sea bass, one of the world’s most overfished species. Today, the chefs serve sustainably caught seafood, not only to staff and visitors, but to the resident fish-eating animals. An outside company collects the used cooking oil from the kitchens—some 5,000 gallons per year—to make soap.

At the urging of the Exhibits Department—where uniforms get phenomenally dirty—Sheppard sent over some green laundry detergent. “They saw with their own eyes that the clothes came out perfectly clean,” she says. The Wildlife Health Center, which has sanitary standards befitting a hospital, gave the new detergent its blessing. Better yet, it turns out that washing with green detergent saves money.

Not every green initiative has been welcomed with unqualified enthusiasm. “A lot of what we have tried to do involves changing people’s entrenched behavior, which is not a trivial thing,” Sheppard says. For instance, carpooling efforts came to naught. Employee hours are too irregular, and the staff is simply too dispersed. “In some areas we can move fast and make a big difference right away,” Sheppard explains. “Others are more challenging. But we’re sneaking up on them little bit by little bit.”

It was getting dark when I parted ways with Chin outside the Lion House and left the zoo. About halfway across Astor Court, I was startled by a loud snort behind me. It was Cleo, one of the sea lions, taking a few turns around her pool. I had almost forgotten that Chin had told me that the Sea Lion Pool was yet another example of how the Bronx Zoo is becoming a greener place almost everywhere you turn. The exhibit was renovated last year. From where I stood watching Cleo in the fading light, it looked no different than it had on my previous visits. It was the same sea lion frolicking in the same pool, but thanks to new filters, the zoo will be saving 160,000 gallons of water per week.