Visitor/Administration Building - NEW!

Queens Botanical Garden

Located in Queens, New York, around the corner from the Mets’ Shea Stadium, the city-owned Queens Botanical Garden provides its 300,000 annual visitors with a welcome reprieve from the usual sights and sounds of city life. Visitors can enjoy and learn from the Wetland Garden, Woodland Garden, Bee Garden, and more. And while the Garden has a reputation for expressing remarkable cultural and horticultural diversity in its displays, it is also building a reputation for its efforts to protect the environment.

In the late nineties, the Garden began a push for environmentally-sound modernization of its 10 acre site. Work began on the first stage of the Garden’s Master Plan in August 2004, and the centerpiece of the plan, a new Visitor/Administration Building, is now complete. This 16,000 square foot building, designed by BKSK Architects, was built to achieve a LEED Platinum rating. And the fact that a Clivus Multrum Composting Toilet System was chosen for this urban, sewered location shows not only the city’s commitment to creating environmentally responsible buildings, it also represents a growing interest in the use of composting toilets in high-traffic, multi-use facilities.

The Clivus system at Queens Botanical, which can accommodate 40,000 uses annually, uses two foam-flush toilets to create a more familiar bathroom experience for Garden staff. Because these toilets use only 3-6 ounces of water for flushing, they are capable of saving over 62,000 gallons of water per year, as compared to 1.6 gpf toilets. While the new facility also uses a number of conventional fixtures, the combination of the composting toilets and the use of greywater for flushing all toilets, keeps a substantial amount of wastewater out of New York City’s already overloaded, combined sewer.

Of course, to earn LEED Platinum, the design team needed more than just composting toilets. Other green features include a geothermal heating and cooling system, rainwater and greywater recycling, rooftop solar panels, and a green roof. And by creating a building that works with nature rather than against it, Queen’s Botanical Garden has reminded us that when it comes to design, nature is tough to beat.