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Motel.com is an environmentally conscious company, and felt that it was the right thing to do to launch an initiative to make it easy for folks looking for a “Green Hotel”.

Motel.com is now maintaining a “green-feature” search, listing all of the Hotels and Motels that are Eco Friendly, and considered friends of the environment. Many such facilities listed in this new Green Hotel Section are actually Certified by the Greenkey Eco-Rating System, administered by Green Key Global. This new site improvement will now identify those Eco Friendly Hotels, as well as show the best rates.

The company reports that many Americans are now aware of the benefits of living an environmentally sound life, and want to be a contributor to further this concept. They know that conserving water, electricity, and natural gas can have a huge economic impact. When people are living this sustainable lifestyle at home, they would like to continue it when they travel. Staying at a “Green Hotel” is a natural choice for them.

Water-efficient practices can through technologies and proper systems can deliver equal or better service while saving water.

Cooling, lighting, water heating/cooking/refrigeration and ventilation account for 85% of total electric usage in hotels and motels. Reducing electricity consumption in theses equipment areas represents considerable energy and cost savings. There are many options for conserving energy: from good insulation to something as simple as changing thermostat settings can help reduce or eliminate the need for costly heating and cooling.

Solid waste in lodging include paper, food, plastic and various other components. Implementing a solid waste reduction program in a hotel can create significant cost savings and reduce land pollution.

at Hotel 1000 in Seattle, they control what gets switched on and off using the system that tells them when a guest comes and goes. When a guest checks in, the heating or cooling kicks in, and when they go out for a while, the air con and other electrical appliances turn down to preset levels.

The system will remember how lights are set and if the fireplace is on and will shut down 20 minutes after the guest leaves and come back to the same setting when guest returns.

And the conference also talked a lot about putting solar panels on hotel roofs with government subsidies.

Perhaps even more impressive than its energy and water savings is the hotel’s recycling and composting accomplishments. In 2008 the hotel recycled 85 tons of materials; in 2009 that number grew to 137 tons. Last year 116 tons was recycled. In late June of last year, a food waste decomposition machine was installed in the loading dock area. The leased machine uses heat, and bacteria treated wood chips to accelerate the decomposition process. Over the remainder of 2010, 110 tons of food waste was composted. “We need to generate at least a few hundred pounds a day to make it [financially] worthwhile,” Martin says of the machine. The Hyatt Regency McCormick Place recycles the following: office paper, newspaper, glass, metal cans, plastic containers, glass, construction waste, cardboard (four to six tons per month), used bulbs, batteries and ballasts, electronics and pallets. Recycling containers are placed throughout the hotel in public areas and guestrooms include a plastic bag for guests to insert recyclables.

“Our focus is to do a lot of the little things that add up to one big green initiative.”

reduced its electricity consumption by 12.7 percent from 2009 to 2010 and its water consumption by 24.4 percent.

Through the use of nano ionic technology

blend of naturally occurring polymeric matrix materials

These same matrix materials ground into a fine powder then mixed with paint and applied to the interior walls of your home or business, produce a continuous flow of healthful negative ions and IFR's, detoxifying the air while removing offensive odors

The hotel will be completely fueled by solar power to meet all of its energy needs

Food and wellness are also key points within the guest experience. The cafe will source its herbs from the nearby organic gardens and guests will have access to health amenities like an outdoor yoga deck and natural pools. 

To attract visitors, the developers have added electric vehicle charging stations throughout the city and will offer entertainment and activity centers such as an equestrian building.

The platform features voice-enabled control with devices like Amazon's Alexa that allow guests to change the room temperature, turn lights on/off and easily change the channel on the television.

Guests may use voice-enabled controls to make dinner reservations or find out what nearby events are taking place over the weekend.

Personalizing the guest experience is critical to earning guest loyalty.

Eric Lundgren is obsessed with recycling electronics.

He built an electric car out of recycled parts that far outdistanced a Tesla in a  test. He launched what he thinks is the first “electronic hybrid recycling” facility in the United States, which turns discarded cellphones and other electronics into functional devices, slowing the stream of harmful chemicals and metals into landfills and the environment. His California-based company processes more than 41 million pounds of e-waste each year and counts IBM, Motorola and Sprint among its clients.

But an idea Lundgren had to prolong the life of personal computers could land him in prison.

With the world becoming ever more reliant on IT, from computers and laptops to smartphones, the issue of how you make it more sustainable, in terms of reducing energy requirements and electronic waste, becomes ever more pressing.

In 2010, it was estimated that 360 million computers were manufactured. A computer is one of the most resource-intensive pieces of equipment, requiring over 10 times its weight in fossil fuels to make

The production of a computer requires 22kg of toxic chemicals, 240kg of fossil fuels and 1,500 kg of water. 80% of life-cycle energy use is accounted for before we even switch a PC on for the first time. Computer Aid International About 2% of the world’s total energy is consumed by building and running computer equipment. BBC Office equipment is the fastest growing energy user in the business world, consuming 15% of the total electricity used in offices. This is expected to rise to 30% by 2020. In the UK, the cost of running this equipment is estimated to be around £300 million annually and rising each year. Carbon Trust 200 million computers and 550 million mobile phones reached the end of their life in 2008.  Computer Aid International 50 million tons of e-waste was generated worldwide, but only 13% was recycled. US Environmental Protection Agency Reusing working computers is up to 20 times more energy-efficient than recycling them. Computer Aid International

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport outfitted one of its gates with a new type of “smart glass” that can adjust for sunlight exposure

the product, called View Dynamic Glass, might improve passenger satisfaction

It turns out that a cooler, darker bar encourages an extra round or two. Alcohol sales soared 80 percent in October

Smart rooms can provide efficiencies in terms of less wasted water or electricity.

Implementing smart room functions appeals to hoteliers because of consumer demand and because they are easily integrated into both new builds and retrofits.

The color and tinting of the glass might be recommended based on where the traveler is coming from, so the lighting is presented in a way to best help them reset their circadian rhythms and prevent jet lag.

water-efficient fixtures can reduce water and sewer bills by up to 30%, while energy-efficient lighting can reduce electricity use up to 75%. Increasingly granular data collection, remote management and analytics are helping hotels exert more nuanced control over energy use, uncovering new pockets of savings without impacting guest comfort.

Better mobile, cloud or web-based access encourages managers to fully use energy saving systems such as EMS

Solutions such as Verdant’s enable users to create recipes — setting profiles they can apply to groups of rooms, based on exposure, season, etc. Since installing the system nearly a year ago, average run times for HVAC systems at Baywood fell from between 34.5-57% to below 23%.

Top benefits of cloud computing Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Here are seven common reasons organizations are turning to cloud computing services: Cost Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast. Speed Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning. Global scale The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically. In cloud speak, that means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location. Productivity On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals. Performance The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale. Reliability Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network. Security Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.

Now, businesses don’t have to burden themselves by storing data in traditional in-house servers; rather, they can opt for a cloud service that would store their data in secured data centres.

As more travelers have become aware of sustainability and its benefits, many sectors within the hospitality industry such as travel, hotels, airlines, transportation, retail, etc tend to modify their products to be sustainable

Annually, $218 billion of food is wasted in the United States. That represents roughly 1,250 calories per person, per day

the hotel industry annually produces 13.6 million tons of waste per year that including soaps, detergents, plastic bottles, and cups, etc

Today, guests around the world are extremely conscious about the kind of hotels they live and holiday in. They constantly need to be reassured that the hotel they are staying at is environmentally friendly and so, gone are the days when ‘environmental consciousness’ was just a fad

What is LEED Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is an internationally recognized Green Building Rating System and measures how efficiently a building or hotel property performs across a relevant set of metrics like energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emission reduction, improved indoor environment quality as well as use of natural resources in construction and their impacts.

The LEED website says, LEED promotes a holistic approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health, namely, sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality.