Hunting Down the Greenest Hotels in New York City
With a nod to Earth Day, we offer our (second) annual roll call of green New York City hotels.
The greenest of the green are those with LEED certification – third party proof of adherence to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards set by the U.S Green Building Council.
Conrad New York — a green hotel
California has the most LEED certified hotels with 25, but New York comes in second, with 11. A New York City property has yet to achieve Platinum level, the green holy of holies. But New York isn’t chump change.
Five properties own Gold level status — the Conrad New York, the Crosby Street Hotel, Element New York Times Square West, the Intercontinental New York Times Square and the NoMAd.
Three hotels score Silver status — the Andaz 5th Avenue, the Andaz Wall Street and the new Courtyard Marriott New York/Chelsea, which opened in December, 2013.
Two additional New York hotels are LEED Green-level certified – the New York Marriott Downtown and Fairfield Inn & Suites New York Manhattan/Penn Station.
But they’re not alone. A growing number of hotels have adopted environmental initiatives. Into this mixed (biodegradable) bag go the recycling of paper, cardboard, ink cartridges and aluminum, biodegradable room keys, energy purchased from renewable sources, roof gardens and sedum plantings to regulate building temperatures, duo-flush toilets that conserve water and soap recycling programs that collect used soap to be sanitized and sent to nations in need of it, to name a sampling.
An informal list of hotels participating in some or all of these initiatives as well as other include Westin New York Times Square, Westin New York Grand Central Station, the Benjamin, Ink48, the Intercontinental New York Barclay, the World Center Hotel, the New York Hilton Midtown. Aloft Harlem, the Waldorf Astoria, P:ark Central, the Refinery and the High Line. If we’ve missed a property, give a shout out.
Brava, for the hotels. And I suspect the “green” works two ways — saving water and energy saves the hotels money as well as being environmentally responsible.
Everybody wins when hotels go green. Thanks, Ginni.
I really hope that websites like http://www.booking.com/ and http://new-york.hotelscheap.org/ are soon going to list which hotels are nature-friendly and green. The glamour of furniture and such is nothing compared to just a few plants in the room or the lobby, making you feel a little bit closer to nature, especially in a big city like NYC.
It is great to hear more and more hotels are going green. I hope in the future that this will become more of a standard feature than an exception to the rule.
I agree. Every year there are more green hotels on our list, but it’s still just a sprinkling. Thanks, Samuel.