If guests at California’s Gaia Napa Valley Hotel and Spa tire of reading the Bible, they can instead read how global warming is one of mankind’s biggest problems. That’s because the hotel has a copy of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in each of its 133 rooms.

Gaia was designed with the environment in mind. Monitors above the front desk display how much water and electricity the hotel is using, an outdoor pond is supplied with recycled water and solar panels provide 12 percent of the hotel’s energy. Natural light streaming in through tubular skylights greets guests in the lobby.

While Gaia is perhaps an extreme example, more hotels are striving to reduce their environmental impact. Chains such as Motel 6, Fairmont Inn and Suites and independently-owned bed and breakfasts are lessening the vast amounts of energy, water and waste that the hospitality industry generates.

“It’s pretty exciting what’s happening in the lodging industry right now,” said Glenn Hasek, editor of Green Lodging News, an online newsletter about green hotels. “If you look at the industry, overall it still has a long way to go, but it’s making significant progress.”

Carefree Travelers

Hotels themselves aren’t the only reason for the traditionally wasteful nature of the hospitality industry. Tourists can be especially wasteful.
“There are certain expectations that travelers have, certain amenities they expect to be available, that always involve a certain amount of waste,” said Roger Doherty, program coordinator of Green Lodging Michigan, a state program designed to promote green lodging.

When it’s hot, guests crank up the air conditioning, Hasek said. “Then they go around traveling for the whole day, yet leave the air conditioning blasting when no one is in the room.”

While hotels are not yet forcing guests to adopt environmentally friendly practices, they remind them of the environment’s importance by doing such things as asking them to use towels for more than one day.

It’s not just environmental benefits that drive this trend, Hasek said. It’s also good for business.

“A lot of it has to do with the news we’ve been hearing about the state of the environment and global warming,” Hasek said. “Certain things are happening—like Al Gore’s movie—that elevate awareness.”

This awareness has led to lofty goals. As of Sept. 1, 2007, Jurys Boston Hotel, built in 2004, has purchased the equivalent of all the electricity it uses from renewable sources.

“We don’t receive renewable energy directly in the hotel (because the hotel design doesn’t allow for it), but the energy we receive is being purchased from renewable sources,” said David Draband, chief engineer of the hotel. The system increased costs by 6 percent, but according to Draband, the benefits to the environment are worth it.

“The reason we did it was just to be good stewards. It’s something that makes us and our guests feel good, and guests can stay somewhere that’s energy conscious,” said Draband.

The hotel also uses compact fluorescent light bulbs, low-flow toilets and showerheads, and room temperature is automatically controlled when guests are out.

Alternative Options

Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn & Conference Center in Augusta, Maine, has only eight guest rooms but is home to the state’s largest solar array. Built with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it covers most of the inn’s roof and produces hot water and electricity with the goal of reducing carbon emissions. The inn also has a wind turbine to supply even more renewable energy. These initiatives helped the inn become the first property in Maine to receive a Green Lodging Inn Certification from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

“Everybody comments on how they love it—they love being able to look just up the hill and see our wind turbine cranking away and to park in the driveway and see our solar panels,” said Rhiannon Schaumburg, front office manager.

Managing waste is another key way the industry tries to minimize environmental impact. Aside from paper and bottles, hotel rooms are filled with many items that could be made of recycled goods. They include the fabric used for sofas, headboards, dust skirts, shower curtains, drapery and accent pillows—all items that are fairly standard in every room.

Valley Forge Fabrics, a hospitality fabric producer, launched a “Fresh” line in May 2007. All fabrics in the line are made from recycled or recyclable polyester. What were once soda and water bottles are now yarns and fabric. “The fabrics not only feel and look exactly the same but wear really well for hospitality,” said Ken Koneck, project coordinator.

The fabric lasts longer than traditional fabric and can be recycled into yet more fabric. Valley Forge’s motto is, “In a fresh world, fabrics live forever.”
And it is American-made.

“That’s part of the story—you can buy fabric in China, but you will be spending money, energy and resources to ship it to the United States,” Koneck said. “That’s not green.”

There are also sustainable options for mattresses. Traditionally, the 4.4 million beds in U.S. hotel guestrooms are on a six to seven-year replacement cycle, according to Tony Hochschild, owner of Sterling Sleep Systems. Most beds end up trashed. “In general, the hotel industry is guilty of buying disposable beds in a world that isn’t in position to have a 600-million-tall stack of mattresses hauled to the dumpster each year,” Hochschild said. “Las Vegas single-handedly fills up the equivalent of the Grand Canyon every year (with beds alone).”

Sterling offers a modular mattress with interchangeable parts. When a mattress gets dirty or worn, the whole thing doesn’t have to be hauled to the nearest landfill. According to Hochschild, the idea isn’t new. “If you go back and look at old waterbeds all the parts were interchangeable,” said Hochschild.

Hotels are recycling other items as well. Fairmont Hotels and Resorts recycles wine corks, coffee grinds and bars of soap, according to Mike Taylor, a public relations representative for the chain. Corks from the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto are reused in flooring, floats, clothing and coasters. Soap from the Fairmont Queen is donated to a laboratory and made into cleaning cream. And in some Fairmont hotels, coffee grounds are used to fill golf course tee-off mounds.

In an industry that thrives on cleanliness, cleaning and laundry products have the potential to greatly lessen environmental impact. However, “there’s still a kind of suspicion that green laundry products aren’t as effective as regular ones,” according to Julie Fry, president of Vaska, Inc—a company that markets itself as the only purely botanical green line and the only non-carcinogenic chemical company. “Rather than walking into a hotel room and having it smell like chemicals, it smells so fresh,” said Fry.

The list goes on. American hotels, such as the Westin Convention Center in Pittsburgh, are copying European and Asian hotels to control electricity in guestrooms. With these systems, guests must use room-entry cards to turn on the electricity, meaning everything goes off as soon as they leave.
Even small hotels can make an impact. “Small, independently-owned hotels can make a difference whether it’s changing a light bulb or buying a percentage of renewable energy, said Draband, “It doesn’t take a lot to make an impact.”

Green lodging programs are popping up as well. Ten states have green lodging programs that include required and optional improvements in areas such as air quality, energy efficiency and environmental policy. There is, however, no universal rating system. “There needs to be a green hotel rating system that can be applied throughout the whole country,” said Hasek.

Doherty hopes to see Michigan follow Florida—the first state with a green lodging program—which now requires all state employees to stay in a certified hotel. “We’re trying to reach the point where the name of the program becomes recognizable and enough hotels are involved where people start actively pursuing it,” Doherty said.

The economic advantages of green hotels, coupled with the current popularity of going green, might be what eventually convinces all hotels to make a conscious effort to decrease their environmental footprints. Said Doherty, “These are opportunities that just make sense on an economic basis, both because you can market that you’re doing this and because it costs money to waste energy.”