From Green Right Now reports

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has certified the Courtyard Orlando Lake Buena Vista Hotel in the Marriott Village as the newest member of the Florida Green Lodging group of hotels.

Florida’s Green Lodging Program establishes guidelines for hotels and other tourist destinations seeking green status, which encompasses water and energy conservation to name a few. To become a designated member of the Florida Green Lodging Program, hotels must implement a variety of green practices. These practices include water conservation, energy efficiency, waste reduction and recycling.

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By John DeFore

Unless you avoided the conventional gift-buying routine entirely this holiday season, odds are good that you spent much of December in some retail environments whose construction and operation involved a lamentable level of waste.

Outdoor-gear merchant R.E.I. is a few years into an effort to chip away at waste in its stores. This September the chain opened a store in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) that is phase two in its development of a long-term eco-friendly model. Most of its innovations have been tested for over a year in a Boulder, Colorado location, but that store, which opened in October 2007, was a renovation of an existing space. This one, situated in a cluster of stores whose heavy traffic is generated by the area’s only IKEA, was built from scratch to accommodate its green agenda.

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By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

Harvesting daylight is an ancient trick – as old as the first man-made structure, as old as life on our planet, actually. Using the sunlight provided by nature is the most basic and simple way to illuminate one’s world. But when it comes to modern, sustainable architecture, the idea is relatively young.

Only in recent times has “daylighting,” as it’s sometimes called, made a blip on the broader green movement’s radar, with industry experts speculating that fewer than 1 percent of all U.S. buildings use natural light in a substantive manner (going beyond windows). The 21st century approach is waaaay more technologically involved than, say, a prehistoric clan setting up its fire pit next to the cave entrance.

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Green Right Now reports

A struggling economy won’t trump concerns about an equally troubled environment among business owners, who remain committed to funding green causes, according to a new survey from SunTrust Bank Private Wealth Management.

Sixty-nine percent of more than 200 business owners surveyed agreed that “even if there is an economic downturn that moderately affects my business, I plan to maintain my current level of giving to environmental causes in the coming year.”

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By Tom Kessler
Green Right Now

In another sign that it intends to become a green business leader, Panasonic Corp. has announced a $9 billion offer to acquire a majority stake in Sanyo Electric Co., a top manufacturer of green technology products.

A combination of the two Japanese companies would result in product efficiencies and potential cost-savings as they merged their huge electronics and appliance businesses.

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Green Right Now

California this week honored 21 companies and organizations with the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards, the state’s highest prize for contributions to environmental issues.

The Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards program was established in 1993. Recipients are selected by a large panel of evaluators and the Secretaries of Cal/EPA, the Resources Agency, Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, the Department of Food and Agriculture, the State and Consumer Services Agency, and the Governor’s Office. It honors projects in nine categories.

Here are the 2008 award winners in each category with comments from the California EPA:

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By John DeFore

East of Las Vegas, Times Square is surely the king of flashy, attention-grabbing and power-hungry signage. Soon, though, one of the intersection’s most novel advertisements will be one that doesn’t draw a single watt from the grid.

Construction is set to begin this month on a massive billboard for copying giant Ricoh, to be mounted at the corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street, that will run solely on wind and solar power generated at the site.

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By Harriet Blake

The benefits of a rooftop garden are not only environmental, but extend to the human spirit. At the Ulfelder Healing Garden atop Massachusetts General Hospital’s Yawkey Cancer Center, those benefits are realized.

The 6,300-square-foot foliage-filled healing garden gives cancer patients and their families a much-needed retreat and helps the hospital conserve energy at the same time. It is just one of the many Boston sites included on tours during this week’s GreenBuild International Conference, a large annual gathering of builders and remodellers sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

Bringing green design into health care and hospital building is a growing trend across the U.S.. At Dell Children’s Medical Center, which opened in Austin, Texas in 2007, green has been the focus from the ground up. In fact, says spokesperson Matilda Sanchez, the hospital is waiting to hear if they have achieved “platinum status” in the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) program sponsored by the USGBC. Among the many green elements at Dell is a four-story interior healing garden with a waterfall that starts on the top floor, as well as a three-acre healing garden with a labyrinth that can be seen from many of the hospital rooms.

“Dell is setting the bar for hospital buildings,” says Sanchez. “While we were still under construction, many other hospitals looked at what we were doing. There was even a delegation from Australia who came to get ideas.”

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By Barbara Kessler

Wildlife habitats might not have the same impact on global warming as electric cars, but they help hold down corners of nature that are threatened by climate change, human development and the contamination of outdoor spaces.

So raise a toast to Anheuser-Busch, which has been supporting wildlife conservation for many years and can now boast of hosting ten wildlife habitats certified by the Wildlife at Work, a program of the Wildlife Habitat Council.

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By John DeFore

Now that bringing your own shopping bag to buy groceries is no longer seen as aberrant behavior, and is inching in some places toward the norm, foes of throwaway plastic bags can open new fronts in their war: the dry-cleaner bag, for one, which reportedly accounts for three hundred million pounds of landfill-clogging waste each year.

Last month, dry cleaning and laundry professionals at an Atlantic City convention were introduced to a new product designed to do away with those single-use bags: The Green Garmento, a more durable polypropylene bag that shifts forms as needed for continual reuse. At home, it’s a duffel bag for collecting dirty clothes and taking them to the cleaner; at the cleaner, it can be reconfigured as a zippered garment bag, keeping items fresh until customers pick them up.

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By Shermakaye Bass

If skiing or snowboarding is your brood’s idea of the perfect family vacation, then ask yourself: What could make it even “more” perfect?

Powdery white slopes and alpine valleys? Maybe a white Christmas? Chances are when you think of skiing, you think of things white, not green. But the green-ski movement, prompted by U.S. groups like the Ski Area Citizens Coalition (SACC), an outgrowth of nonprofit Colorado Wild, and National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) “Sustainable Slopes” program, is changing that – little by little.

A fairly young endeavor (SACC started in 1999; Sustainable Slopes in 2000), the movement’s emergence reminds us that as healthy and nature-loving as this sport might be, it hasn’t been known for its environmental sensitivity.

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By Tom Kessler

The Philadelphia Phillies are still trying to close out the World Series, but the team has already been declared winners off the field. The National League Chanmipions were among the winners cited in the Environmenal Protection Agency’s 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards. The announcement was made at the the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference in Denver, Colo.

EPA’s Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program helping to increase the use of green power among leading U.S. organizations. The program encourages organizations to purchase green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity use. The EPA says the program has hundreds of partner organizations buying billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually.

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