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ANNAPOLIS, Md. — In most offices, the bathroom would be an odd place for a can of mulch.

But at the headquarters of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Annapolis, Md., the mulch has a purpose — just like everything else in and on the building.

The foundation spent $30,000 beyond the usual price for a conventional bathroom to have the toilets empty into a composting vat in the furnace room beneath the offices instead of using water. Staff members take care of business and then throw a cursory handful of mulch down the hatch to speed the decomposition process and soak up some of the odors.

Microbes and bacteria take care of the rest in a composting machine, turning the waste into fertilizer, and "they work free of charge — they're all volunteers," says Ed Wintermute, who knows the building better than almost anyone.

The system helps the building save $29,000 each year on water and sewage bills.

And that's just the bathroom.

Because the foundation's building has deliberate environmental tweaks in every nook and cranny, clean-building experts quickly deemed it the world's most energy-efficient, environmentally friendly building when it opened in November 2000.

It still holds that distinction, but thanks to the interest of architects and developers — particularly for public and nonprofit buildings — more blueprints are turning shades of green.

Visitors to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Phillip Merrill Environmental Center can't miss the three 12-foot-high pickle barrels that collect rainwater from the roof. It's filtered for laundry and equipment rinsing.

Inside, the support beams are made from highly compressed strips of scrap wood. And solar panels on the back wall soak sunlight for electricity, while panels on the roof power hot-water heaters.

"Almost anything they could think of, they thought of," said Wintermute, who leads tours of students, architects and other visitors through the offices several times a week. "With all the energy saving features, it only uses 30 percent of the electricity, heating and cooling that a conventional building would use."

Developers and designers have taken notice. In the mid-1990s, the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council in Washington, D.C., drafted guidelines for efficient and environmentally conscious structures.

By January 2000, 17 projects qualified for the council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, from the barracks of the Navy's Great Lakes, Ill., training center to PNC Financial Group's Pittsburgh headquarters to the Utah Olympic Oval in Salt Lake City, site of some of the speed-skating events.

In the last two years, 307 more projects have signed on.

Federal agencies, state and local governments and nonprofit organizations have dived right in, accounting for 195 of those projects. Private companies are building 89, with another 23 projects either undisclosed or being built in other countries.

"Most state and local governments and nonprofits own their own buildings," said Peter Templeton, of the U.S. Green Building Council. "They reap the benefits, so they're very keen on making buildings as productive as possible."

While the Chesapeake Bay Foundation paid $1.5 million extra on its $6.3 million headquarters to make it green, it will make that money back in energy and water savings after 10 years. From then on, it's money in the bank.

"We didn't even look at it from the standpoint of economic gain," said Chuck Foster, the foundation's chief of staff. Other developers can choose from a buffet of energy-efficient technologies to save money faster.

"They can custom design their own payback period to start making money in two or five years. It's just different strategies."

Not every building would have to spend $100,000 extra for a geothermal heating and cooling system instead of the standard electric model. On the other hand, in the age of cheap electricity, solar panels sometimes take two decades to pay themselves off in energy savings.

But the Chesapeake Bay Foundation managed to save money on materials no one else wanted, like the wood chips for the support beams, the old pickle barrels and the kitchen's floor of linoleum — a material that has long since disappeared from new American homes.

Architect Lidia Berger said any builder can make some of the most common improvements, which often come down to simple design changes, like using big windows for natural light and having open spaces for better circulation.

"Those are not all new technologies," said Berger, a senior designer at the Washington, D.C., office of the HNTB architecture firm.

"We abandoned it during the dark ages of the '60s and '70s, which produced buildings sealed from the external environment. This effort to conserve energy created some serious indoor environmental problems."

On warm days in Annapolis, when a steady breeze is blowing off the bay, the staff at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is told by lighted signs to open the large windows and let the building air out.

Foster says little things like that make the staff happy and healthy.

But some of the visitors, he adds, still don't know what to think of the building's eclectic mix of pickle barrels, linoleum and wood chips.

"Some say it looks very rough, very utilitarian," he said. "It's one of those buildings you either love it or you hate it."

It might be unique now, but members of the Green Building Council and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation say they hope it is merely the first of its kind. Then maybe mulch in the bathroom might not seem so odd.