Inside Westin’s new green hotels: element

by Grant Martin on

In today’s hotel landscape, there are two types of green hotels: those that incorporate a few eco-nuggets to act green, and those that are truly, organically green. Westin’s element hotels are the latter.

Designed as a chic, modern competitor to Marriott Residence Inns, element hotels are longer-term properties that boast all of the amenities of an apartment while retaining the comfort and ease of a Westin hotel. Most significatly, the chain is the world’s first to be LEED certified, underscoring Westin’s commitment to energy conservation and environmental impact.

Step into one of the new hotel rooms and the difference is apparent. Every effort is made to recycle materials and minimize waste, from the repurposed wall art to water filters in the kitchen faucets to bulk shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom shower. Recycle bins take precedence over the rubbish and like many chains these days, sheets are only changed when necessary.

Outside of the rooms, the hotels make the extra effort to integrate with the local community and highlight green initiatives. The Hanover, MD element, will soon host a farmer’s market, culling from the regional economy and encouraging residents to buy and cook their own food. In Lexington, MA, cooking classes are hosted in-house by Whole Foods.

The comfort in an element goes far beyond the self satisfaction of helping the environment, however. Perhaps it’s the new, clean furnishings or the lush Heavenly mattresses — but spending time in one of these rooms feels less like a cold, empty hotel and rather like, well, home. Give one a try and you’ll see.

Currently there are five Elements hotels in operation, spread across the country from Lexington, MA to Hanover (Baltimore,) MD to Houston and Irving TX to Las Vegas, Nevada. Eighteen more are scheduled to open up across the country over the next few years, so keep your eyes peeled for one breaking ground near you. You can also check the Starwood site for any location updates.

Room rates vary but are typically around $100 per night.

How green is your hotel?

by Katie Hammel on

Not too long ago, any hotel that had one of those “please reuse your towels” signs in the bathroom was considered “green“. But with new hotels upping the ante by adding more features that reduce waste and environmental impact, it takes a lot more than that to truly be green. Here are some of the greenest hotel features to look for in an eco-friendly hotel.

Sheet and Towel Reuse Programs
Literally, this is the least a hotel can do. Asking guests to reuse towels and only changing the linens every few days or between guests no doubt saves water (and money for the hotel) but those positive contributions can easily be negated through other actions. If this all the hotel does, it might just be more frugal than green.

Bulk Toiletry Dispensers
Every time you check into a hotel, you’re provided with small bottles of face wash, body wash, lotion, shampoo and conditioner. Even if you’ve only used a minuscule drop, those bottles are tossed out and restocked at the end of your stay. This happens every day, for every room sold, at hotels all around the world. That’s a lot of tiny bottles clogging up landfills. The greener option being implemented in many hotels is to install bulk dispensers (similar to soap dispensers in public restrooms) that dole out small amounts of shampoo, soap and lotion without the extra packaging.

Local and Organic Cooking
Hotel restaurant chefs that use local, fair-trade, sustainable and organic ingredients get a gold-star for for being green. Using local products means that the food travels less to get to the consumer, which in turn means less energy is used and less emissions are added to the air from the planes, trains and trucks that transport food. Organic ingredients are created without the chemicals and pesticides that can harm the surrounding eco-systems, fair-trade products support local farmers, and sustainable foodstuffs are made in a way that doesn’t deplete the natural resources of the area. Hotels that employ these practices in their restaurants are doing something that is not only healthy for their guests, but is healthy for the community and environment as well. The hotel gets even more bonus points if some or all of the produce comes from the hotel’s own garden.

Green Lighting Practices
Replacing fluorescent light bulbs with ENERGY STAR certified compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) means that a hotel will use 75% less energy per year. While hotel guests can do their part by turning off all unnecessary lights when not in the room, some hotels, like the LEED-certified Orchard Garden Hotel in San Francisco, make this easier by requiring the lights to be activated by key card. The key card, usually attached to the hotel key, must be inserted into a slot in order to turn the lights on. Since you’ll obviously need to take the key and lighting key card with you when you leave the room, there’s no way you can leave the lights on while you’re out.

Green Building Materials
The buildings at Sadie Cove Wilderness Lodge in Alaska are constructed from scavenged driftwood, the mattresses and bedding at the Asheville Green Cottage in South Carolina are made from all organic materials, and the walls at Los Manos B&B in Colorado are built of local adobe and the ceilings are insulated with cellulose from old newspapers. All of these properties are using green building practices that help conserve precious resources. Using recycled, organic, scavenged and eco-friendly (like low-emission paints) materials in the building process makes a hotel green from the very beginning.

Reducing Water Usage
The El Monte Sagrado in Taos, New Mexico filters its wastewater into pure drinking water, but there are plenty of other ways hotels can save water that are a littler easier to do. Many green hotels install low-flow regulators in showers and toilet tanks, and some even put in automatic-timer showers that shut off after a certain number of minutes. (You can restart them with the push of a button, but the ticking clock serves as a powerful reminder to make it quick). Hotels in temperate areas have chosen to do their landscaping with tropical plants, which require less water to maintain.

Alternative Power
Many hotels are looking to alternative sources of power; the Alpine House in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, gets all of its power from wind turbines. Look for hotels that boast the use of solar and wind power for even part of their energy usage. Hotels that use shade trees and crosswinds to cool rooms, rather than air conditioning, also increase their eco-friendly factor.

Recycling Programs
All the paper used in the Hotel Triton in San Francisco, from napkins in the restaurant to stationary in the guest rooms, is made from recycled materials. Of course, after it’s used, it still gets tossed out. I’ve never seen a recycling bin in any hotel I’ve stayed in, and I highly doubt that housekeeping takes the time to separate recyclables from trash. As a result, plenty of paper, aluminum and plastic that could be recycled ends up getting tossed. Any hotel that offers recycling bins in the room is one step up on the green ladder.

Green Cleaning Products
Using non-toxic, all-natural cleaning products helps reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals that get into the water system and cause pollution. Look for hotels like Denver’s Queen Anne Bed and Breakfast which uses only baking soda to its clean tubs, sinks and toilets.

Other Green Practices
When combined with some of these larger-scale practices, the smallest acts can help make a green hotel even more eco-friendly. All Fairmont hotels offer free parking for hybrid cars, the Vancouver Hilton offers an alternative fueling station, and many hotels will provide free bikes for guests to get around on. Stocking guest rooms with glass drinking cups instead of plastic and relying on natural lighting as much as possible in public areas are two additional practices that make a big difference.

I doubt there’s any hotel that employs every single one of these practices. But it’s a safe bet to say that the more of these strategies a hotel uses, the greener it is. No hotel will have zero impact on the environment, but choosing a hotel that take does its best to use environmentally-friendly policies will help make your travels greener.

Listen to Times Online’s eco-holiday discussion today!

by Brenda Yun on

The Times (UK) is launching a new series of online chats with a discussion on green travel this morning at 8 a.m. EST (1 p.m. London time). Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith, co-authors of ‘Clean Breaks’ the new Rough Guide to eco-friendly holidays, will answer questions on green travel.

Richard Hammond, the founder of www.greentraveller.co.uk and the co-author of Clean Breaks – 500 new ways to see the world’ will answer questions and recommend fun holidays that tick the right green boxes. Hammond also wrote an article about 10 green trips for The Times last week, which was based on his Clean Breaks book. He wrote a second article for Times Online on the ‘opposition’ – his five favourite green travel guidebooks.

Jeremy Smith, the former Editor of The Ecologist and co-author of ‘Clean Breaks’ will also be on hand to give advice. They will be joined by Steve Keenan, Times Online Travel Editor and Ginny McGrath, Times Online Assistant Editor.

To join the discussion, go to http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/green_travel/article6741434.ece.

Eco-Friendly HALL Wines Earns Gold LEED Certification

by Kendra Bailey Morris on

The first time I tasted HALL Cabernet Sauvignon, I will nibbling a cheese plate bar side at Fleming’s Steakhouse and Wine Bar. After asking our bartender sommelier for his recommendation for a big, hearty red, he poured me a taste of the 2005 HALL Cab. Is that black cherry I’m getting? Or perhaps a little oak mixed with leather and currants? I’m certainly no wine expert, unless you consider drinking lots of the stuff a special skill, yet even I could tell there was something very special about this wine.

HALL wines, which has two wineries, one in St. Helena, California and the other in Rutherford, has not only received exceptional scoring for many of its wines, including 97 points from Wine Enthusiast for the 2006 HALL “Exzellenz” Cabernet Sauvignon, but has just received the prestigious LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Certification for its Napa St. Helena location making HALL the first winery in California to earn this designation.

With state-of-the-art facilities, including many sustainable design elements such as radiant flooring, solar energy, as well as usage of recycled and local building materials, HALL is leading the industry when it comes to working to solve environmental challenges. Owner Kathryn Hall, whose family has been growing grapes in California since 1972, along with her husband Craig, have made it their personal mission to leave minimal carbon footprints when it comes to the art of great winemaking, establishing them as leaders in environmental preservation.

As Kathryn herself puts it, “At HALL wines, we grow our own grapes and craft our wines, and so we are obligated to ensure the health of the land, as well as that of the greater Napa Valley ecosystem.” Keeping in mind that HALL’s grapes encompass over 500 acres, this is both a great commitment and an accomplishment.

Visitors to the winery can get an up-close-and-personal look at the winery’s dedication to the environment with complimentary LEED® tours being offered each day through the end of August. For those who are unable to make a trip to the winery, visiting HALL online offers a firsthand glimpse (with videos) into the LEED® certification process led by owner Kathryn Hall along with President Mike Reynolds and architect Jarrod Denton.

Yet, for a true taste of what HALL has to offer, both for sustainable wine growing practices as well as the palate, I encourage you to get a bottle for yourself (which can be purchased on HALL’s website or at a variety of wine shops). And, don’t worry, you don’t need to be an expert in order to properly enjoy a glass of their award-winning wines, but it would behoove you to join Kathryn in her vision of an environment supported by earth-friendly wine production.

–Kendra

Solar airship will fly from NYC to Paris

by Katie Hammel on

First, let’s just get this out of the way: it is not, I repeat not, a blimp. Whew! Okay. . . Turtle Airships (a Spanish company that seems to have some intense aversion to the word “blimp”) is working on an airship that will make the journey from NYC to Paris, powered predominantly by the sun.

The top half of the blimp airship will be covered in solar panels that will store energy in batteries and use it to power four electric motors. The craft will also have a biodiesel engine as a back-up so the ship can fly in bad weather and at night. It will be able to take off vertically, land on ground or in water, and travel at around 40 miles per hour in ideal weather (making for a very long Transatlantic journey).

The airship is having a bit of difficulty getting off the ground at this point though, due to lack of funds. Turtle Airships is working on a prototype and hoping that as buzz for the project increases, so will the financing. Once the cash comes in, they say they’re ready for lift-off.

Until then, you can indulge your Goodyear fantasies with Airship Ventures, which offers Zeppelin flights from several California cities, ranging from $199 to $600 per person.

[via Wired]