If you count yourself among those who believe that good design and green design cannot co-exist, there is a new book that will change your mind in a heart beat. “World’s LEED Hotels: Innovation, Renovation & Development” profiles 23 green hotel projects that all incorporate stunning design. (See related article.) Created by Ling Ling Chang, project manager for Atman Hospitality Group, the book was published by Wen-I Chang, founder and president of Atman Hospitality Group. The book includes essays written by owners, developers, managers and others who have had a role in creating some of the greenest hotels and resorts...

Our weekly e-newsletter is back after one week off. During the past week I have been asking all Green Lodging News subscribers to renew their free subscriptions to this newsletter and the weekly Green Supplier Spotlight. Thank you for signing up again and please be sure to tell your colleagues to do the same! It is important because those who do not renew their subscriptions will no longer receive the weekly publications. Periodically, trade publications go through this process; it helps to eliminate the addresses of those who move, change jobs, etc.  A lot of exciting things have been happening...

Periodically, print trade publications go through the process of asking their subscribers to renew their subscriptions (the reason no e-mail newsletter was delivered to subscribers this week). I suspect you have encountered this before. It is an important step for them to take. There are all kinds of reasons addresses change: businesses move offices, people change jobs, some people go to that great zip code in the sky. Green Lodging News just turned four years old. In the four years that I have been publishing Green Lodging News, I have not asked my readers to renew their subscriptions to the...

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...