Is This Really America’s Most Sustainable Hotel?

A look inside the country’s first carbon-positive lodging.

T

he travel world is filled with buzzwords that tend to lose their meaning over time: if everything is “iconic” “luxurious” and “off-the-beaten-track”, is anything really? If you’re someone who cares about our planet’s future, it’s easy to worry that “sustainable” is joining these overused ranks. Over the past decade, major players in the industry have rightly started caring about just how much they add to the destruction of our planet (if only other major corporations could do the same, sigh), and travelers have seen the results of this with ideas like carbon travel credits, perils like overtourism, and trends like agritourism entering the mainstream.

Fittingly, many hotels have embraced this sustainability ethos, from chain hotels offering optional housekeeping and getting rid of single-use plastics to boutique hotels purporting to run on natural energy, source all food from on-site gardens, and follow strict water conservation guidelines. As easy as it is to applaud these hotels and pat yourself on the back for choosing to stay in one, it’s important to not lose sight that greenwashing is a very real thing in the travel world, and a company saying they will implement certain practices is a whole different thing than actually doing them (as is sustaining those practices as a business grows and expands).

So anytime a hotel starts talking about being eco-friendly, I can’t help but be a little skeptical. The average traveler isn’t going to research each claim a hotel makes, and that’s likely what some properties are counting on as they continue to cut corners for the sake of profit.

These all are the thoughts that crossed my stressed-for-the-future mind when I heard about the opening of Populus in Denver, Colorado, an eye-catchingly designed boutique property that bills itself as the country’s first carbon-positive hotel, along with a bevy of other eco-friendly brags that sounded quite impressive. But I wanted to hear more about how all of this really works in the hotel world and what it means for the traveler experience.

The Basics

Located in the mostly business-oriented neighborhood of the Golden Triangle in downtown Denver, and a quick walk from major landmarks like the Denver Art Museum and Civic Center Park, the Populus is a 265-room, 13-story hotel designed by the Studio Gang architecture company and developed by Urban Villages, a Denver-based real estate development company. Its most flashy claim is to be the country’s first carbon-positive hotel, which if you’re familiar with industry buzzwords like carbon-neutral and carbon-negative, can be a little confusing. But basically, the hotel explains its carbon-positivity goals as not just offsetting its carbon footprint (as most carbon-neutral companies claim to do), but taking away even more carbon from the environment than it adds; it plans to do this by planting a tree for every night every guest stays (those trees will do the actual hard work of removing carbon from the environment).

The hotel has already committed to replanting over 70,000 trees in Colorado’s Gunnison National Forest, and while this promise is certainly more than any other hotel has done, it’s still very hard for anyone, including the hotel itself, to really gauge how much carbon it will put out in its lifetime.

A more measurable plan of sustainability can be seen, however, in the hotel’s impressive commitment to producing zero food waste. There are two on-site restaurants and one coffee shop, and all will have full use of the hotel’s onsite bio-digester, a rarity in the hotel world. This impressive machine is basically a heavy-duty composter, creating fertilizer that then goes to local farms. In addition, the hotel also uses 100% wind and solar energy. There’s also no on-site parking lot, and the hotel encourages guests to walk, use public transit, and ride-share as they explore Denver. And the hotel is committed to keeping itself honest: it hopes to eventually receive a LEED Gold Certification, the industry standard for sustainable building practices. 

The Construction

The unconventional exterior design of the Populus is meant to turn heads: its 13 stories are contained within an all-white structure with a jagged collection of slit-shaped windows, designed to evoke the bark pattern on the Colorado state tree, the Aspen (fittingly of the Populus genus). Admittedly, you won’t mistake the hotel for a tree, but you definitely won’t miss it; it’s the type of building that makes you say “What exactly am I looking at?” Locals seem divided on whether this is a good thing for the aesthetics of the city, but it definitely makes sure that Populus is on the minds of visitors to downtown Denver.

Aside from the homage to nature, the building was, of course, constructed with sustainability in mind. The vast majority of the structure is a special kind of low-emissions concrete (which brought the hotel’s carbon footprint during construction down about 30% compared to the traditional alternative), and while even low-emissions concrete is not considered the most eco-friendly of materials to produce, it is one of the most durable. The goal of the hotel’s construction was not to necessarily use the most eco-friendly material, but to use materials that would last longer, ideally producing less waste over time due to fewer updates and rebuilds; the thermal capabilities of the material are also meant to reduce the overall use of heating and cooling within the building. Even room carpets (one of the most notorious aspects of a hotel that needs to be continually replaced) are made of a special material that is designed to break down within 15 years of being in a landfill.

Courtesy of Nephew

The Design

As with most boutique hotels, Populus is still meant to be a beautiful showcase of interior design, with the goal of proving a space can be both aesthetically pleasing and environmentally sustainable. Continuing on with the exterior’s tree-inspired theme, the lobby is all woods and natural textures (check-in happens at a giant repurposed tree stump while nearby a draped mycelium fabric art installation hangs above the first-floor bar). Elevators to guest rooms (equipped with nature sounds from Rocky Mountain National Park that correspond to the time of day) lead to darkened corridors meant to mimic the inside of a tree canopy. Guest rooms themselves are light and airy, thanks to the asymmetrical windows (about a third of the rooms come with a hammock-like bench to enjoy your view). Furniture is either upcycled or locally sourced, and the artwork is all Colorado-inspired, whether from local artists or framed-pressed local wildflowers.

The Experience

With all this in mind, the question ultimately comes down to: can a hotel be built, decorated, and run as sustainably as possible without interfering with the guest experience? Any environmentalist will tell you we need to make individual sacrifices if we’re ever going to minimize the most catastrophic effects of climate change, but the good news is staying at a hotel like Populus doesn’t mean you have to think about impending climate catastrophe every second of your trip.

Populus understands the all-important truth that if we’re ever going to reach necessary climate goals, it takes corporations with power and resources to spend the money and time to bring down global temperatures. And this is the kind of stuff that happens behind the scenes, so you won’t be seeing the bio-digester or the tree-planting during your stay. But there will be plenty of eco-conscious touches (like room key holders that double as plantable wildflower seeds) and you will find few disposable items in your room (cloth napkins in place of paper napkins, glasses instead of plastic cups, and almost all the items in the mini-bar are compostable or recyclable). None of this takes away from a superb guest experience, unless you count the time thinking about how you can make these same small changes in your everyday life once you leave.

Working in the travel industry while also keeping close to the reality of our climate’s future can be tough. Buy less, reuse more, but I know deep down that the biggest thing I can do to reduce my lifetime carbon footprint is to never get on another plane again. That doesn’t seem like an enjoyable life to me (and for many, plane travel is an essential, life-saving necessity) so what else can we do, as global citizens in a capitalist world who care about both seeing our planet and saving it, than choose to spend our money with the corporations and businesses that value the same things? Populus knows this better than any hotel I’ve personally visited, and has reached a level of sustainability that I hope will one day be the industry standard going forward. It’s not hyperbole to say that our planet’s future might just depend on it.