When you've got to go, the garden gets it

Maggie Lawton at the Landcare Research centre. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Helping to make good, clean, rich compost might not be on many office workers' minds when they head for the loos. But not so for staff at one Auckland University building, who know they are helping the gardens when they feel the urge.

Workers on the first and second floors of the university's Landcare Research centre at the Tamaki Campus frequent composing lavatories which use no water for flushing, virtually no electricity and feed large gathering units on the ground floor, strategically placed on the northern side to keep them warm for optimal odourless functioning.

After April, the lush gardens surrounding the building will be fed that human waste combined with sawdust, sprinkled throughout the politically acceptable native vegetation including pittosporums, puka, hebes and coprosma.

"We looked a little while back and it wasn't quite ready," explains Landcare's operations manager Maggie Lawton of the compost which has been made in the last two years. She was also the building's project manager. "The tanks are so huge. But after April, we hope it will be distributed."

She is impressed with the toilets completed two years ago, but admits the loos take some visitors by surprise.

"You don't hear anything," she says of using toilets on her first-floor office. "But I prefer it to a conventional toilet because it's cleaner and completely odourless," she says, explaining how a small fan produced negative pressure to remove all smells.

The tertiary structure is a leader in environmental building design and has caught the eye of the property sector for a wide range of advanced concepts - and won two big awards.

Hand basins have water-saving taps and only pump out low-volume flows. Water from the basins and urinals drains directly into the sewer system but loads are more like those produced in a much smaller building.

Composting toilets would have been installed throughout the entire building but were not feasible on the ground floor because, to work efficiently, the system needs a certain degree of drop.

Rainwater, collected and stored on site, is used for flushing ground-floor toilets and for urinals throughout the building. Even how that water gets to the right place has environmental integrity. The water is pumped from the collection tank up to a roof header tank, using power supplied by a small wind turbine.

All up, Landcare is delighted with the result - and associated accolades.

In May, the avant garde building won the Property Council's prize for energy efficiency, an award sponsored by the Government's Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. It also won a Ministry for the Environment green ribbon award.

The $11 million building at 261 Morrin Rd houses New Zealand's largest collections of insects and fungi but sports many "green" features and is widely cited as the country's leading commercial ecologically "green" building.

The building's design was the subject of workshops held with Landcare staff, the Building Research Association and Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, consultants and planners.

Not all aspects of the building are living up to expectations. Staff demands for carpet on the concrete floors, the need for more air-conditioning in microbiology areas and traffic noise are just some of the issues yet to be resolved.

But Maggie Lawton is clear about one thing: no one is complaining about the lavatories.


Go for green

Landcare's "green" building has:
* Composting toilets - waste to go on surrounding gardens soon.
* Rainwater-harvesting system and water recycling systems.
* Small on-site wind turbine, 8m high, to supply electricity.
* Special building design features to reduce heating and cooling bills.
* Solar water-heating panels in the roof for laboratories.
* Natural ventilation and rooftop units which circulate air via heat-exchange devices.
* Carparking area with pervious surface to allow water to penetrate.
* High energy savings of up to 70 per cent (about $70,000) annually.