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.

I took a tour in early December with store manager Todd Callaway and Daniel Grillo, an “outreach specialist” who coordinates the store’s group workshops and is particularly enthusiastic about convincing locals they can use their bikes to commute, even in Texas heat. If there have been any hitches in the location’s start up, you wouldn’t guess it to speak with these two enthusiastic men, who are clearly smitten with little earth-friendly details a casual shopper would never notice; they took pride in the belief that the store’s physical design was every bit as sales-friendly as any other retailer’s but has a far smaller impact on the environment.

“We’ve redesigned about 85% of the fixtures,” Callaway said as he gave me the first of many breakdowns on the novel components and impressive stats behind the shop’s counters, racks and displays. At the moment, he was standing beside a shelf system made of steel and Plyboo, a plywood-like product whose attractive outer layers are made of fast-growing bamboo.

“The point of this fixture is that when we go to dispose of it later on, it’s fully recyclable. Everything on it can be recycled really easily.” (When the store was under construction, representatives say that 75% of the building waste was recycled or reused in some way.)

Callaway and Grillo were well versed in the levels of post-consumer/post-industrial waste that had been recycled into surfaces all around — from the steel shavings that offered visual appeal in a bathroom vanity and the footwear department’s wall made of sunflower seed husks to the counter made of waste sorghum and Grenite that is “85% post-industrial waste ceramic plus soy.”

Beneath our feet was one way in which the Round Rock venture learned lessons from Boulder. While the upstairs level used a lot of waste-reducing, no-glue carpet tiles from the ultra-green company Interface, the downstairs featured a yielding rubber material whose confetti-like look came from its being composed of recycled car tires and tennis-shoe soles.

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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Slideshow: Lighting with natural daylight

“In a layman’s terms, daylighting – which was our original term for it – is the process of bringing natural sunlight into a building and distributing it so you can turn the electric lights off,” says Bruce Bilbrey, co-owner of the Natural Lighting Co in Phoenix, founded in 1990 by his brother, Paul Bilbrey. (See the photo above of Frito Lay offices in Arizona — lit totally by daylight.)

“It’s not using the sun to create power to run the lights. It’s not a solar electric system. It’s using the sunlight directly. You use it with lighting controls, so that the lights can be off when there’s an adequate amount of daylight in the space.”

Bilbrey says the technology involves installation of skylights and reflective “lightwells” that architecturally bend lighting into a space, then, via large lenses and diffusers, deflect the light around. The company’s various systems can be used in residential and commerical spaces, and, depending on a building’s size, ceiling heights, lighting requirements and other needs, different types of diffusers and are employed.

“In very basic terms, it’s solar lighting. We call it simple solar,” Bilbrey explains. “But it’s not the same as having a skylight, which is just a feature on the roof where the light kind of comes in and goes where it wants – though the whole process does (use) ‘skylights.’”

Over the past several years, he and others in the business, such as Lighting Control & Design in Glendale, Calif., have noted a steady rise in the harvesting and harnessing of natural solar goodness. By doing so, “daylighting” converts don’t just save on energy bills and carbon output; they increase productivity among workers and create a healthier indoor environment that can lift spirits as well as enhance mental prowess. (This picture shows a daylight system at a charter school in San Diego.)

Daylighting even helps boost retail sales, studies show.

Large retailers including Whole Foods Market, Kohl’s, Target, Wal-Mart and JC Penney now use solar lighting (known generically as light, or daylight, harvesting) in many of their stores, while corporations such as Frito Lay/Pepsi and branches of the U.S. military employ solar harvesting to shed light on multiple situations – provided the situation occurs during daylight hours.

“Solar lighting really only works during the day,” says Bilbrey, who along with his brother and co-founder James Hennessey works with retailers Whole Foods, Target and Safeway, as well as various schools, municipalities and military bases around the U.S.

“We manufacture and install Component Daylighting Systems, which don’t store light, like a solar electric system,” the Arizonan says. “But in many buildings, the (daytime) lighting load is 50 to 70 percent of total energy use. The lighting load in one gym we worked with was 70 percent of the energy used in that building.”