In the current green hotel building world, the equivalent of an Academy Award (an Oscar) would have to be LEED Platinum.

It is the top level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

LEED is offered by the U.S. Green Building Council for new and existing buildings.

Until now, only one hotel in the United States had earned LEED Platinum—the Proximity Hotel in Greensboro, N.C.

The Proximity was awarded its honor in October 2008.

Phil Sherburne, owner of the Bardessono Hotel, Restaurant and Spa in Yountville, Calif., just announced that his property is the second in the United States to have earned LEED Platinum.

Congratulations to Phil and the management team at MTM Luxury Lodging for achieving this prestigious green building honor.

“We didn’t start out targeting LEED Platinum status,” Sherburne says. “We simply wanted to build the Bardessono Hotel, Restaurant and Spa in the most environmentally responsible way we could.”

I have always kind of wondered about the seriousness of the commitment of the leading online travel agencies (OTAs) in regard to promoting green lodging establishments. In the past when I have gone to their websites in an attempt to try to find the properties, I have been unsuccessful or at least had a difficult time in locating a link for more information. (Perhaps that is why the OTAs call their green sites “microsites”—so small nobody can find them.) To some degree the green hotel sections are still difficult to find, as I describe in the article written this week about the top online travel agencies and their treatment of green lodging.

In late November I wrote a column asking readers whether or not their properties’ AAA Diamond ratings had ever been affected negatively by their green initiatives. I received a number of responses—some said their green initiatives had not been impacted while others said their ratings had been affected. I was prompted to ask readers this question because I had heard a number of times from hoteliers, innkeepers and vendors that AAA inspectors sometimes had issues with what would be considered green products or programs.

Dryers are evil. Well, not quite, but they account for nearly 70 percent of all energy consumption in the laundry. You should do all you can to minimize the amount of time your towels and linens spend in them. The reasons: not only to reduce energy consumption but to also prolong towel and linen life (and the life of duvets, robes, etc). Makers of washer-extractors agree. In conducting research for an article on washer-extractors I learned just how much suppliers have done to reduce required drying time. This has occurred primarily through advanced controls technology and stronger mechanical spin power (G-force).

Is your hotel an island in its own community? Disconnected from all other life forms except for your guests and fellow employees? If so, you are ignoring one of the most important principles of sustainability: actively engaging with the local community to not only provide jobs but to also create awareness of social and environmental issues, to support local businesses, and to enhance the community’s overall cultural and physical health and wealth. I thought about this issue this week while writing an article about La Cusinga Lodge in Uvita, Costa Rica.

Happy new year! I hope that you had a relaxing holiday. I just returned from a week of vacation in Florida and it was great to see so many hotels doing so well. Here’s hoping that trend continues this year. The last couple of years certainly have not been easy for our industry, with an energy price spike followed by one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. For many the recession is far from over and that is why experts are predicting only a modest recovery this year with better things to come in 2011 and 2012.

If you are hesitant to purchase an environmentally advantageous product for all of your guestrooms, why not test it in just one guestroom? Better yet, place all of the green products you wish to test in that room and ask your guests what they think. That is what the Best Western Philadelphia Airport South at Widener University intends to do in January. Since the 60-room property opened a year ago, management, with student and staff support from Widener University, have been putting together what they call their Eco-Pro Room (short for Ecological Prototype).

When you shop at the grocery store, the products you buy include labels that detail ingredients and nutritional value. If you are building or renovating your lodging establishment, however, there is a good chance you will never know what chemicals are in the building materials that you buy. Why is it important to know? There is a long list of chemicals that are known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. These are commonly found in building materials currently on the market. To make it easier for designers, architects and others to know which chemicals to avoid, Peter Syrett and his colleague Chris Youseff recently created the Perkins+Will Precautionary List.

One way to reduce costs related to waste removal while keeping waste out of the local landfill is to give away items to those people in need. In the lodging industry “waste” can include food, toiletries, partially used rolls of toilet paper, or guestroom furnishings. Finding the right agency to donate items to can be a challenge. To save time and labor, it has got to be an organization willing to pick up the items. It has also got to be an organization that can be trusted—one that will actually deliver the items to those in need.

The opening of CityCenter in Las Vegas and a soon-to-be released study that will appear in The American Journal of Industrial Medicine highlight the importance of safety in the workplace. As reported in the Las Vegas Sun, during the construction of CityCenter, which just saw its first three buildings open, six construction workers were killed. And, according to The American Journal of Industrial Medicine study, women—especially Hispanic women who work as housekeepers—were 50 percent more likely to be injured on the job than men and had an injury rate two-thirds higher than their white female counterparts.