There’s an aftershock rippling across the country and it’s starting in California. No, it’s not from an earthquake, but it does involve the planet. After the initial jolt that Al Gore delivered with An Inconvenient Truth, California lawmakers addressed global warming head on by enacting the first piece of legislation in the country to directly mandate reductions of greenhouse gases (GHG) linked to climate change. The effects are being felt nationwide. In fact, industry worldwide is feeling the impact of climate change, and those in the hotel business, whether they want to or not, are taking notice. Last year, California...

One of the legacies of the Industrial Revolution is the introduction of cleaning chemicals into the marketplace. Since WWII, more than 75,000 industrial chemicals have been registered with the EPA. Of those, less than 2 percent have been tested for toxicity, birth defects, and cancer. Moreover, chemical companies are under no legal or regulatory obligation to study the long term health effects their products have on the human body, nor are they required to fully disclose all of the ingredients in their products. Citing proprietary privilege, they only report on active ingredients. This accounts for less than 5 percent...

You may be on a tight budget or just looking to create renewed exposure and interest for your green hotel or B&B efforts, yet cannot seem to find anything newsworthy to report. We’ve all encountered that from time to time. Don’t worry; there is still hope. There are hundreds of ways for you to create some news of your own to get the exposure you need. Here are some of them: Stage a green event. For those of you who are unfamiliar with doing this, you may think it sounds difficult. With a little creativity and proper planning, you can pull...

Hosting a sustainable event means integrating environmental, social and economic considerations into all aspects of the event planning and management process. It means working with all involved to reduce environmental impacts and to contribute to positive social and economic development whenever possible. Sustainable event management entails assessing existing policies and practices and taking a holistic approach to integrating sustainability into every day tasks and decision making. Sustainability entails a different way of doing business and not necessarily a more onerous one. Events require the consumption of resources and result in the generation of wastes and pollution. A sustainable event management...

My travels recently took me to Detroit and Chicago for meetings and speeches. By the time I returned home to California, my travels—if my accounting is correct—accounted for 51 plane flights during the first half of 2007. I’m not bragging, mind you. Indeed, it’s rather embarrassing (and more than a little exhausting). But like many of my environmental professional brethren, air travel is far and away my biggest personal and professional footprint. And it’s not likely to change any time soon. This reality notwithstanding, the airline industry seems poised to finally confront its environmental impacts—and mine. The past few weeks have...

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but there’s a big leak in your hotel’s kitchen. It’s a veritable gusher. And it’s been going on for a long time. However, before you send maintenance running with a wrench, I recommend a call to your F&B manager and executive chef. Because the leak isn’t caused by water; it’s from pre-consumer food waste. And it’s not anyone’s fault; it’s a by-product of the way hotel conference centers forecast and produce food for banquets, buffets and receptions. In fact, 4 to 8 percent of the food you purchase will...

As green options in the meeting and conference industry expand, environmentally conscious event planners, organizers and companies are finding that going green not only helps save the planet and resources, but also offers a wealth of other benefits and advantages. As the following questions and answers demonstrate, green meetings can help save the planet and yield real rewards for meeting attendees and your budget. What Exactly is a Green Meeting? After convening a task force on this topic, the Convention Industry Council presented this definition: “A green meeting or event incorporates environmental considerations to minimize its negative impact on the environment.”...

With the recent push by the White House to address environmental issues, energy conservation has, once again, come into sharp focus. Some hotels do nothing to conserve energy, while others make a cursory effort at it. The fact is that for some nominal cost and effort, real energy savings can be gained, along with the hotel doing its part to reduce greenhouse gases. The two biggest energy costs in a hotel are lighting and heating. The other two, air conditioning and “base load” (fans, motors, etc.) are also significant. Lighting can account for up to 30 percent of a hotel’s...

NATIONAL REPORT—When looking for ways to green your hotel, one of the first things you should focus on is energy efficiency. Pure economics show it is cheaper to save a kilowatt hour then it is to produce it. Couple this with reduced carbon emissions, and efficiency is one of the first things a property should consider, even before looking at renewable energy sources. The first energy conservation measure that should be evaluated in hospitality, whether it is a small 100-room property or a large destination resort, is lighting. Common lighting opportunities include T-12 to T-8 or super T-8 linear fluorescent...

The world of green business seems to have come out of nowhere to dominate magazine and newspaper coverage. The media calls and e-mails have been arriving fast and furious—a dozen or more each week, even more than a month after Earth Day. CNN, the New York Times, Business Week, Advertising Age, Good Morning America, the Sundance Channel, Reuters, the Discovery Channel, Marketplace radio, and a slew of local papers. A surprising number seem to have some variation of the same two questions: Is all of this focus on the greening of business merely a fad? When will the bubble burst?...