Anyone considering building a green hotel over the next five to 10 years should pay attention to the progress of the Oregon Sustainability Center. Even though this office building planned for downtown Portland, Ore., will not house a hotel, it will provide many lessons for our industry. The Oregon Sustainability Center is a collaborative effort of the Oregon University System in partnership with the City of Portland, the Portland Development Commission, Portland Sustainability Institute, and a group of leading environmental organizations led by the Oregon Environmental Council and Earth Advantage Institute. SERA Architects (The Nines Hotel, The Courtyard by...

Does your director of housekeeping dabble in honeybees on the side? Up on the roof of your hotel? I suspect not but that is exactly what Graeme Evans does. He is the director of housekeeping and the resident beekeeper at The Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver, B.C. Graeme manages five rooftop hives that will produce about 600 to 800 pounds of honey this year—up from 485 pounds in 2009. At least eight Fairmont Hotels & Resorts properties have beehives—either on rooftops or elsewhere on property. According to Fairmont, the focus on honeybees is their way to help reverse Colony Collapse...

The last couple of weeks you may have noticed some subtle design changes to the weekly Green Lodging News e-newsletter. Well, I am excited to announce that the Green Lodging News website has also been redesigned. Be sure to check it out! Thank you to Lakewood, Ohio-based ninebolt, inc. for engineering the redesign. Together, ninebolt and Green Lodging News have created a site that allows for more news and feature content, more vendor news, a tweet feed from Twitter, and an enhanced Green Product & Service Directory (now with 54 product and service categories).You will also notice a new...

Three years ago, the W San Francisco, a 404-room property located in the heart of the city’s downtown, had a waste diversion rate of 40 percent. Today, the hotel is approaching 80 percent with its 77 percent diversion rate and saving $60,000 a year. What changed? First of all, the hotel hired a new general manager, Michael Pace, formerly with the Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group. Pace helped create and launch that company’s Earthcare program. Hiring Roger Huldi, director of operations, has also turned out to be a very smart decision. Huldi is leading the effort to pursue zero...

Tennessee, in the news recently for the early May flooding in the Nashville area (the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center will not reopen until November), had some good news to celebrate this past week with the launch of the state’s “Tennessee Green Hospitality” certification program for lodging properties and restaurant facilities. The program was adopted from “Chattanooga Green Lodging,” a recent winner of The Governor’s Environmental Stewardship Award. I wrote about Chattanooga’s program almost a year ago. Congratulations to the Tennessee Hospitality Association for launching a certification program without government assistance. For those of you in states without...

Ten years ago while working for another publication I wrote my first fuel cells article. In that article I quoted author Joseph J. Romm who described the fuel cell as the “electric motor of the 21st century.” Fuel cells are more common than you might think and offer a clean alternative to conventional power generation. Fuel cells are a family of technologies that utilize the energy in a fuel electrochemically. The byproducts of a fuel cell reaction? Just water and heat. Fuel cells offer efficiencies exceeding 80 percent when waste heat is captured. They deliver up to 47 percent...

How do you motivate your employees to be relentless when it comes to being environmentally responsible and smart while at work and at home? One idea the environmental development manager (Diana Beltran) and Grand Hyatt Green Apple Environmental Committee at the Grand Hyatt New York came up with is an in-house newsletter called the “Green Apple News.” The first edition was published earlier this year in February, the second edition in April, and the third edition will be published very soon. According to Diana Beltran, the publication is distributed by e-mail to hundreds of employees at the Grand Hyatt...

According to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, as of 2008, there were 49,505 properties in the United States with more than 15 rooms. According to Clean the World and the Global Soap Project, organizations that both collect partially used soap for those in need, approximately 250 properties are currently participating in their donation programs—much fewer than 1 percent of those 49,505. It is clear our industry still has a lot of work to do to stop the soap waste that is sent to landfills. I first wrote about Clean the World a year ago. Based in Orlando, Fla., the...

I just returned from the 2010 Hospitality Design Exposition and Conference. It was held at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas. Approximately 7,000 registered for the event that featured more than 900 manufacturers and service providers. Highlights for me were Green Day—the first day of the conference—and having an opportunity to meet with so many vendors, each with their own fascinating green story to tell. If you ever want to get a sense of how the industry is faring, attending one of the annual big events is one way to do it. My conclusion after chatting...

In an effort to recognize the environmental and sustainability programs at universities and colleges across the country, The Princeton Review, in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), recently released “The Princeton Review’s Guide to 286 Green Colleges.” The guide is based on a survey of hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States. The survey looked at the following: building certification using USGBC’s LEED green building certification program; environmental literacy programs; available courses; formal sustainability committees; use of renewable energy resources; recycling and conservation programs, and much more. Why should academic institutions care about sustainability? There are...