I’ve loved the Oregon Zoo since I was a child—the groovy mosaic and sculpture of turtles outside signaling excitement that was inside. The zoo has transformed in the last thirty years, that two-turnstile mosaic entryway giving way to a massive entrance for the most attended paid tourist attraction in Oregon. I’ve gone from funky bell-bottoms to organic Mom clothes, trying to spend my money on things that reflect a more concerned, careful way of living. Already sold on the vastly improved habitats and the mission of the zoo, I was astounded to learn just how passionate the people who run it are.

How many other zoos have a dedicated Green Team? With the goal of making the Oregon Zoo’s daily practices as sustainable as possible, the Green Team focuses their efforts on cutting down on waste, and thinking carefully through the many daily aspects of running the zoo. When I went to sit in on a Green Team meeting, I found that it was nearly paper-free, using only what was absolutely necessary instead of the copious handouts usually associated with corporate congregations. Subjects discussed ranged from how to encourage the gift shop to consider more Earth-Friendly products, to figuring out ways to convert the zoo trains to biodiesel. Thanks to previous efforts, the zoo offers Master Recyclers, electric cars, and 100% shade grown coffee.

Zoo Director Tony Vecchio says of the Green Team, “They are so passionate about what they do that it’s not an area that I feel needs my attention. They come to me and let me know what their crazy schemes are, and I tell them if we can afford it or not. But I don’t have to prod them to do more, do more—they’re already going that way.”

LIME was lucky enough to sit down with Vecchio for an extended interview.

LIME: The Oregon Zoo is amazing. I want to talk with you about sustainability.

TONY VECCHIO: The biggest possible story about the zoo’s sustainable practices would have to be our state-of-the-art composting facility. It’s pretty cool. Have you gotten a tour of it yet?

LIME: No.

VECCHIO: You need to see it!

LIME: Is that the Zoo Doo?

VECCHIO: Well, you know, we’ve called it Zoo Doo for years, as kind of a fundraising thing, but this is for real. This is all our herbivore manure produced in the zoo—tons and tons and tons of it. So where we used to spend $20,000 a year hauling this stuff to the landfill as waste, now we’re saving the $20,000 by composting, and then we’re using the compost on the zoo grounds, so we’re saving another couple thousand dollars we used to pay for fertilizers and compost. Which I think is a great story! You know, what do you do with 100 tons of elephant manure?

LIME: And do they also compost clippings and stuff?

VECCHIO: Yes, all the organic waste, what you would call yard waste—and we do food waste too, our restaurant does food waste.

LIME: Is this something zoos are doing nationwide, or is it unique to the Oregon Zoo?

VECCHIO: I think everybody’s thinking about it. Everybody’s doing something, and bragging about it, and recognizing they need to do something. Some zoos just recycle aluminum cans. That is their “green” effort. Some zoos are farther along than we are—not a lot! I visited the zoo in Syracuse, and they have a new education building. It’s all LEED-certified, Silver LEED. I was really impressed with what they are doing to make the building sustainable. It’s now part of our design strategy for any new exhibit. We can do solar energy, we can do the green roofs. It’s becoming second nature to think this way.

LIME: Even the parking lot has surface water runoff filtering landscaping…

VECCHIO: Yeah, isn’t that cool? There’s a guy who works for the city that I used to know when I was on the board of the Audubon Society. He got a grant from the EPA on how to produce stormwater projects, and they wanted an education component. So he thought, where can we educate the most people? And he knew the zoo had the highest attendance of any cultural attraction, so he called me and said, “Can we do this in your parking lot?” They did a small piece of our parking lot, and now every winter during the slow season we’re going to take one area of the parking lot and do the same thing. And eventually our whole parking lot will be bioswale.

LIME: You even have compostable, biodegradable “plastic” cups in the restaurants?

VECCHIO: Isn’t that cool? Have you seen those yet? They look, feel, and behave like plastic, but they’re cornstarch! Knives, forks, spoons—they’re made of cornstarch that looks like plastic. They break down in 60 days. What used to take 50 million years now takes 60 days!

LIME: What other sustainable avenues is the zoo looking into?

VECCHIO: The first few years [the Green Team was] picking all the low-hanging fruit: can and bottle recycling, paper recycling. The head of the Green Team right now is also the head of custodial services. And he’s passionate about it, so he’s looking for things that you can’t recycle, finding places where we can take them. So now, all the things that you’re not allowed to put in your normal recycling bin—your yogurt containers, Cool Whip containers, the kind of plastics they won’t take at the bin—he’s found someplace that will take them. Styrofoam—we take the Styrofoam peanuts up to the gift shop and they reuse them, but the Styrofoam molding kind of stuff. So we’re looking for new markets to take everything, so we can have zero waste. We’re probably three quarters of the way there.

LIME: Really? So zero waste is the goal?

VECCHIO: As close to zero waste as you can get. I call that low-hanging fruit, but Mike [Weatherman, the zoo’s custodial manager and chair of the Green Team] has done a tremendous amount of work—it’s not that low-hanging! We’re also doing things like replacing the ballasts on fluorescent lights. We are using a third of the energy we were using a year ago because of these new ballasts. We’re studying the water lines, fixing leaky pools, replacing leaky water lines. That’s a big, expensive job, but we’ve saved a lot of water and a lot of money. So now we’re looking at the bigger, more difficult stuff.

LIME: Do you think most people coming to the zoo care about these issues?

VECCHIO: I think they care about them personally—this is Oregon! But I don’t think anyone gives it a second thought, “Does the zoo do this?”

LIME: Do they know when they leave?

VECCHIO: That’s one of the things we still have room to improve on. We do a lot of great stuff that the public doesn’t know about. No one has time to figure out how to get that word out. The knee-jerk reaction is to put up a sign, but people don’t read signs. We have to really work hard to do that stuff, and the question is, do we really want to work that hard just to let the public know we’re doing a good job? Is that the mission? So we’re not that good at that. But if we look at it not like bragging but as educating the public, it probably is worth putting more effort into it. That will be the next great challenge for the Green Team.

LIME: And the sustainability naturally falls into that—educating the public about the plight of animals, and what we can do to help stop the destruction of their natural habitat.

VECCHIO: That is all about education. We don’t even call it “education” in the zoo business anymore. It’s all about “conservation education.” In the old days, we used to teach how much an animal weighs and where it’s from. That kind of thing is secondary now. It’s all conservation now. Everything we do relates to that in some way. And you could preach that and not be doing any of this green stuff—but we have to. Ethically, we have to. We’re supportive of that message.

LIME: What’s your favorite animal?

VECCHIO: I love them all. I’ve always been interested in every animal. Right now I’m partial to pigs. I serve on the Pig Advisory Group of the Zoo Association. And they are really cool animals—they look neat, their behavior is neat, they are very intelligent. But I also know the conservation side. It’s a very sad story. The Visayan warty pig will probably be extinct in the wild in about 20 years. The conservation priority there is just phenomenal.

LIME: Making the zoo's mission—to inspire the community to create a better future for wildlife—all the more urgent. And proving the daily sustainable practices of these green thinkers even more valuable.

Visayan warty pig photo by: Michael Durham © Oregon Zoo