SEQUESTERING IN STYLE

A new hotel says it's 'carbon positive'. Is that hype or reality?

- CINDY HIRSCHFELD

One of the first things to catch your eye on entering the Populus hotel in downtown Denver, USA, is what looks like sheets of cowhide hanging above the restaurant's bar.

But the art installation material is actually Reishi, a leathery material made from mycelium, a root-like structure found in fungus.

It's just one of many elements at the new 265-room hotel (rates from US$299, or 9,800 baht) that are meant to evoke nature and underscore a broader mission to offer what the Populus bills as an exceptional level of sustainability. (A second, 120-room Populus is to open in Seattle.)

In fact, the hotel, designed by Chicago-based Studio Gang firm, claims it is the United States' first "carbon-positive" hotel (meaning that it is supposed to sequester more carbon than it emits). It's a bold statement, but just one among a growing list of self-applied superlatives by other properties.

Aruba's Bucuti & Tara Beach Resort, for example, calls itself "the Caribbean's first and only certified carbon-neutral resort". IHG Hotels and Resorts bills its new Voco Zeal Exeter Science Park in Exeter, England — with an exterior clad in electricity-generating vertical photovoltaic panels — as the brand's first net zero-carbon hotel.

The Alohilani Resort in Honolulu says it is the "first hotel in Hawaii to announce carbon neutral certification commitment".

The Populus' claims go a step further, said Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, and author of The Hype About Hydrogen: False Promises And Real Solutions In The Race To Save The Climate. The hotel, he said, "has the chutzpah to claim they are being a net positive for the climate, which is a much stronger claim than neutral".