Green: more than just the color of the mint on your pillow.
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When you're on the go, traveling for work or play, it's not always easy to find accommodations that match up with the green ideals you live by at home. Happily, there are an increasing number of resources available to help you stay green wherever you travel.
First off, what makes a green hotel?
As with green homes, there are myriad ways to go green, from energy efficiency upgrades, like using compact fluorescent light bulbs, to health-related green improvements, like switching to green cleaners or using low- or no-VOC paints and furnishings, to systems improvements, like LEED or Energy Star-ratings for the entire building.
A good green hotel will mix many of these; as your home away from home, hotels can engage in many of the same actions you do at home in each room. In the bathroom, for example, they can use amenities like low-flow showerheads, give you the option to not wash your towel every day, offer eco-friendly shampoos and soaps, and clean it with green cleaners every day. They can serve local and organic food in the restaurant downstairs, use furniture that doesn't contain PBDEs and other icky chemicals, and put motion sensors on the lights so the lights don't get left on all day when they don't have to be.
How to find green hotels
With those basic ideas in mind, how do you find places that engage in such practices? Thankfully, there are a growing number of resources that offer lists of greener hotels, along with their own definitions for what makes a place "green," and even ratings for those places to help you pick based on what green considerations are more important to you.
Green Hotels Association is a member-based organization that includes hotels in the majority of U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and a few in Mexico, the Carribean, South America, Europe and more. They don't list each hotels' individual green offerings, though membership requires that green actions be in place.
Green Hotel Reviews does exactly what it's name suggests: reviews green hotels, both for a given hotel's general accommodations and for their green efforts, whether that includes LEED or Energy Star-certification or membership in the Green Hotel Association. They don't have every green hotel under the sun, but the site provides useful contextual information about what's out there, and how to look for it.
Environmentally Friendly Hotels incorporates some fun online community features into their site, allowing users to submit and review various green hotels based on their experiences and relative green accomplishments. The site also uses a hotel rating system that scores individual hotels on their green efforts. Using "green trees" rather than "gold stars" or some other scoring mark, hotels can be rated on everything from using of alternative energy to donating to charity to greywater recycling and more. You can also use the site to search for a green hotel wherever you're heading.
New to the game is Eco Hotels of the World, which offers an amalgamation of many of the services mentioned above. They have a green rating system (using stars, rather than trees), offer an Editor's Pick to showcase a great example of a green hotel, and offer the opportunity to search by "green stars" and location. Though they've only been online for about six months, they already have listings on six of the seven continents (sorry, Antarctica).
Difficulty level: Easy to moderate
Learn more about finding green hotels at TreeHugger
Many green hotels are still flying below the radar of these organizations and sites, or are starting to go green with a selection of rooms or suites. Here are some of TreeHugger's favorites:
Collage Eco-Suite at Hotel Triton
Kimpton Hotel's Celebrity Eco-Suites
Very Green Hotel Opens In Napa Valley
New York's First Eco Hotel to Open in 2008
Green Room at the Chicago Hilton O'TreeHugger
Hilton Vancouver Washington LEED Certification
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