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The Last Refuge
Post Carbon Fellow Hillary Brown was quoted in this piece on the dangers of glass buildings to birds. Hillary was a lead author on Audebon Minnesota's Bird Safe Building Guidelines.
From the article:
Chicago, New York and Toronto all have guidelines for reducing bird kills, ranging from the basic and obvious (turn out the lights at night) to more sophisticated ones, such as using fritted glass (glass with ceramic dots or patterns baked on). Since fritted glass significantly reduces solar gain, saving lots of energy, it tends to be used more in LEED certified buildings. Julie Leibach writes in Audubon Magazine:
"It's what we call a win-win-win situation: The planet wins, the birds win, and your bottom line wins," says Fred Charbonneau, a leader of Detroit Audubon's lights out program, Safe Passage Great Lakes. "There's no downside." As for glass, fritted patterns can block out rays of sun, thereby cutting down on cooling costs, as in the case of the science center at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. The college installed fritted glass into the center, a notorious bird killer, four years ago. The project cost $20,000 but has saved the college about $48,000 in cooling fees since then. "That's really what good, sustainable, integrated design is--solving multiple problems with single solutions," says Hillary Brown, author of "Bird-Safe Building Guidelines" and a principal architect at New Civic Works, an architectural firm focused on environmentally friendly building design.
Link to Bird Safe Building Guidelines
Image credit: Magnus Bråth/flickr
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