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Green is the New Black at the Newly LEED-Certified Nines Hotel

Go To The Hotel's Web Site Where: 525 SW Morrison [map], Portland, OR, United States, 97204
September 8, 2009 at 1:19 PM | by | Comments (0)

If there's one thing Portland is known for, it's being green—literally, of course, with all of those lush Weeping Sequoias dotting its landscape, but also in the environmental sense. Long before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth made being eco-friendly chic, Portland was a city leading the green revolution, and its building practices have been a part of this wave.

Take The Nines hotel, for instance, which we raved about after paying it a visit upon its opening last fall. In addition to personal notes from maid service and free WiFi, we can add yet another point in its favor: The Nines recently earned LEED Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a system designed to rate the sustainability of structures and "quantify environmentally sounds building practices." It's no small feat to earn LEED certification, and certainly not a title that's bestowed to any building claiming to have gone green. Consider this: The Nines is only one of five hotel properties worldwide to have earned the Silver ranking.

So, what exactly did the hotel have to do in order to get its LEED wings? Some of the features which will have the socially-conscious standing up to applaud include low-flow faucets, "Green Seal" certified housekeeping products, and energy sourcing from wind power and carbon offsets. For you number-crunchers out there, the efforts resulted in saving 44,000 gallons of oil and the amount of metal it would take to make 1,800 Toyota Priuses. Holy ecological, Batman.

This season, and hopefully long into the future, green is definitely the new black.

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