A Green Facility

Education
Teamwork

The Wild Center is a green building demonstration project.

Explore this page or visit The Wild Center and you can see first-hand all the elements that make it the first LEED Certified museum in New York. The Wild Center’s onsite exhibit includes outdoor labels that detail everything from the inner workings of the huge solar array on the Bio Building to the pioneering new heating system that relies on renewables to heat the entire 54,000 square foot complex. If you can’t visit, you can see many of the stories here.

The Wild Center offers a complete self-guided or staff-led tour of its energy-saving and other green systems.

Sustainability at The Wild Center

The overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that a severe disruption of the Earth’s climate is underway, and that the disruption is being caused by an overload of carbon pollution. The climate has shifted in the Adirondacks already, with impacts on species and systems and more – changes that are a result of the carbon already released. As a science-based organization, The Wild Center is deeply concerned about how changes in one of the major pillars that support the natural world will impact life on Earth.

From Youth Climate Summits to creating solutions to environmental issues through our Building a Greener Adirondacks initiative, The Wild Center is making strides toward a sustainable future.

The New Path Tour

The New Path is an outdoor exhibit that lets you see behind the scenes at The Wild Center’s Silver LEED Certified green building practices. The trail leads you from the solar and living roof of the Bio Building to the flushless composting toilets and the grassy parking lot. The Wild Center is the first LEED Certified museum in New York.

Burning Pellets to Keep Warm

The Wild Center heats its facilities with a clean-energy resource, wood pellets. These tiny morsels, manufactured right here in the North Country, are heated up in our very own boiler. This boiler helps us minimize energy costs and lower our carbon footprint. Best of all, it’s a system that can be mimicked in your own home.

Solar Hot Water Demonstration

See exactly how a different kind of solar system can heat water and homes, even in cold climates.

Wild Boiler Press Conference – The Wild Center – 2010

Hear the details of a press conference held in the Flammer Theater at The Wild Center in 2010, where it was announced that a wood-pellet boiler and solar hot water system would be installed to lessen the dependence on fossil fuels for heating and hot water.

Growing a Green Roof

Man tending to plants on green roof
It’s such a good idea that it might become the standard roof of the future. Plants insulate. Studies show that the insulating benefits of green roofs can reduce annual heating and cooling costs by as much as 30 percent. Think of how cool a field is in summer compared to black pavement. Green roofs have the same impact, using the plant’s own cooling system to keep homes cool in summer. In a typical town, rain running off roofs can overwhelm sewer systems, causing them to overflow and spill untreated waste. Green roofs retain as much as 80 percent of the rain that falls on them. And there are no shingles to strip off and replace.