Green hotels LEEDing the way?

National Geographic Traveler’s intelligent travel blog on Wednesday featured an interesting piece about Proximity Hotel, which is working toward LEED certification. To get into tiptop eco-shape, the Greensboro, N.C., hotel has implemented everything from solar panels and locally made furnishings to waterless urinals.

In case you haven’t heard of LEED, it’s a rating system used by the U.S. Green Building Council that stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Under this system, buildings are evaluated against criteria like sustainability, energy efficiency, water savings, and use and selection of materials.

I contacted the U.S. Green Building Council and learned that there are eight LEED-certified hotels in the U.S. Two are here in California, both certified last year: San Francisco’s Orchard Garden Hotel and Gaia Napa Valley in American Canyon. The Palazzo in Las Vegas was also recently certified with “silver” status.

In addition, nearly 200 buildings, many of them in the hospitality sector, are considered “registered” for LEED status. These are projects that “are currently somewhere ‘in the pipeline’ – either still in the conceptualization phase or building design and construction phases - and have registered with LEED with the intention of gaining certification upon completion,” said U.S. Green Building Council communications coordinator Ashley Katz, in an e-mail.

With increasingly more of us interested in minimizing our environmental impact during our travels, I imagine that the green-hotel movement has only just begun. It’s good for the planet, good for our consciences, and I’m betting it’ll ultimately be good for the pocketbooks of the hotel owners who invest in going green.

— Susan Derby, Special to the Los Angeles Times

[Photo: Solar panels at Proximity Hotel; ProximityHotel.com]

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 11, 2008 at 4:08 pm by Susan Derby and is filed under East Coast, Eco-Travel, Las Vegas, Northern California. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.