Ms. Donnally

Eco-Friendly Practices

What LEED 2012 Will Mean For Hospitality

By Trish Donnally, Director of Communications , ForrestPerkins

With hotel executives discussing the newest updates to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating systems, LEED 2012, due to be released in November of this year by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), many are asking what this will mean to the hospitality industry.

LEED, a third party certification program with nationally recognized benchmarks developed by the USGBC, provides the now familiar Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum level certifications. What’s compelling about LEED certification, at this point, is that there are enough studies that have proven that buildings with a LEED designation enjoy a significant lease-up premium, reduce the impact on the environment, offer occupants a better environment and cost less to operate.

“We’ve all been patiently waiting for standards that are more usable by the hospitality industry and that effort was started in 2007,” says Pamela Parsons, AIA, ASID, LEED®AP, vice president of ForrestPerkins. “The downturn in the economy in 2008 caused volunteers, brands and hotel owners to take a two- or three-year pause to focus on other more pressing matters. Now that the industry is reviving, there is renewed focus on the hospitality standards.”

“The hospitality business is gaining traction, occupancy is coming back. We’re starting to see numbers like we used to see in 2008. It’s coming back slowly,” says Randy Gaines, vice president of engineering, housekeeping, laundry operations for the Americas at Hilton Worldwide.

An Opportunity for Leadership

The comeback of the market and the proposed changes in LEED 2012 all create a great opportunity for the hospitality industry. “Rating systems are tools to manage decisions. LEED has really helped with organizing and transforming the built environment. Now we need to look deeper at particular nuances for the human occupant,” says Linda Sorrento, FASID, IIDA, LEED AP, BD+C, principal of Sorrento Consulting, LLC, a sustainable consulting firm.

In the US, as of January 6, 2012, there were 11,363 LEED-certified commercial projects, and of those, 123 were hospitality projects, according to the USGBC. “In the United States alone, hotels represent more than 5 billion square feet of space, nearly 5 million guest rooms, and close to $4 billion in annual energy use.” In other words, the hospitality industry has great potential to make a big difference in its environmental footprint.

“At this moment in time, we really need to seize this opportunity,” Sorrento says. “For hospitality, in particular, this would be an opportunity for leadership.”

Kal Wellman, LEED Associate at USGBC, says a few years ago the non-profit organization of experts from the building continuum recognized the need for further penetration into specific market sectors, the hospitality industry among them. “So we decided to look at all of our rating systems and the credits within them,” Wellman says. “We saw LEED 2009 was used mostly by office spaces and we wanted others to pursue LEED at a greater scale. LEED 2012 is designed to take into account the specific needs of all space types including hotels, schools, retail, data centers, distribution centers and warehouses.”

LEED Volume Program

The new LEED Volume Program was developed in 2009 to help organizations with large portfolios of property pursue multiple certifications at once based on one pre-certified prototype design which leverages uniformity across an organization’s building design and operational practices, Wellman says. “It’s not easier, but it makes it more attainable,” he adds. Marriott International, InterContinental Hotels Group and Starwood Hotels and Resorts are already actively participating in the LEED Volume Program.

“The program creates economies of scale for participating organizations; the more projects they put in, the more money they save,” says Wellman, who adds that instead of having to have “one-off” hotels individually certified, a brand may have many hotels certified at once as long as the standards approved in the pre-certified prototype are followed. The USGBC spot checks random properties to verify.

Two Key Modifications

Hospitality industry leaders from around the country have worked to propose modifications and clarifications that would make the consensus-based LEED 2012 more relevant to hotels, motels and resorts, since they were originally written predominantly for office buildings. In the long run, green rating systems provide a win-win situation and people learn a great deal as they journey toward sustainability.

“The experience of just about everybody who uses LEED is invaluable,” says Penny Bonda, partner at Ecoimpact Consulting, and the founding chair and primary author of LEED for Commercial Interiors, 2006. “It raises the threshold. What we used to think was okay isn’t okay anymore. All of that documentation and verification is still valid.”

Two of the proposed changes that have been approved for LEED 2012 are expected to have big ramifications for the hospitality industry. One, called the Comprehensive Ongoing Purchasing Credit, says, according to the USGBC, “At least 25 percent of total combined food and beverage purchases (by cost) must meet one or both of the following criteria:

• The food or beverage is labeled USDA Organic, Food Alliance Certified, Rainforest Alliance Certified, Protected Harvest Certified, Fair Trade or Marine Stewardship Council’s Blue Eco-Label.

• The food or beverage is produced within a 100-mile radius of the site.

The exception for Hospitality is what’s most significant. The LEED 2012 will “exclude wine, beer, and liquor purchases from credit calculations.”

Since sales of alcoholic beverages are such a key component of the hospitality industry’s Food and Beverage service, this exclusion will be a game changer.

“We have a lot of Five Star properties and we have to deliver what our clients want,” says Gaines of Hilton Worldwide, which has 3,800 hotels around the globe. This exclusion will help.

Another important proposed LEED modification is the Indoor Environmental Quality Credit: Low Emitting Interiors. This credit is meant to “reduce concentrations of chemical contaminants that can damage air quality, human health, productivity, and the environment.”

“This says they are creating a healthier immediate environment for the associates and guests because no emissions of dangerous chemicals, fumes or toxic materials will be used in the FF&E,” says Jeanne Varney, lecturer at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University.

“Buildings are very objective and measureable. Humans are very subjective and likely not measurable. The human perspective is really important in hospitality,” Sorrento says, mentioning that healthcare costs, employee productivity and guest satisfaction, among other things, affect the bottom line. “Guests don’t know what’s behind the door to their room. A customer is captured inside his guest room with little choice. He can’t open a window, because it’s typically a sealed environment. There is an ability from the building’s side for measured results around energy, water and materials. But when you’re looking at the human side, things are more out of your control. It’s the most varied of vertical markets. There are a variety of people, attitudes, moods, levels of comfort and cultures. But if we can control the human perspective to the best of our abilities as designers, then the building side is most likely to have better results,” Sorrento says. “Designers have that ability, especially interior designers, who have the skill set that has that particular sensibility around humans.”

Hilton’s LightStay Program

Some hospitality companies are integrating sustainability into the way they do business. The new LightStay program at Hilton, which went into effect in 2009, is an excellent example. “LightStay is our own metric. We’ve put together our own tool to measure our carbon footprint,” says Gaines. Specifically, this system evaluates performance across 200 operational practices, including housekeeping, paper product usage, food waste, air quality, chemical storage, and transportation, at each of its properties. He adds that in 2010, Hilton Worldwide properties reduced 6.6 percent energy use; 3.8 percent water use, 7.8 percent carbon output; and 19 percent waste output.

“We leverage LightStay to improve our sustainability performance on a continuous basis. We think that overall sustainability adds value. It makes your building worth more in the market. If owners were looking to sell or even refinance in today’s environment, owners want to know what we’re doing,” Gaines says.

Whatever sustainability rating system is used, these programs make people think. “Whether it’s a LEED certification or an Energy Star rating, there’s an inconsistency in the hotel guest experience,” says David Mahood, co-principal of Olive Hospitality Consulting. “If you’re going to really address this, you need to also look at how the guts of a hotel are procured. Where are they coming from and how were they produced? The chain of supply is so heavily dominated by Southeast Asia. It’s very hard for the guest to walk into a certified hotel and look at the lobby furnishings and the guest room case goods, when almost everything is sourced from overseas, and make the connection to sustainability.”

Like Mahood, you’ll have a chance to express your opinions about the LEED 2012 Rating Systems Drafts, found at http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=2516, which will open for a third round of public comment on March 1, 2012 for 20 days. So speak up! Let the USGBC know what you think. “We get a lot of comments,” says Wellman of the USGBC. “We read every single comment that comes in.”

Trish Donnally, Director of Communications for ForrestPerkins, is an award-winning journalist. She was the editor in chief of Washington Spaces, a design magazine owned by The Washington Post, for five years. She co-authored The New Traditional with Darryl Carter, Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2008. Ms. Donnally launched PaperCITY in San Francisco, California and a year later became Managing Editor of the lifestyle magazine in Dallas, Texas. Earlier in her career, Ms. Donnally was the Fashion Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle for 15 years. tdonnally@forrestperkins.com Ms. Donnally can be contacted at 202-478-8810, Ext. 150 or tdonnally@forrestperkins.com Extended Bio...

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