One Night in the Self-Proclaimed “First U.S. Carbon-Positive Hotel”

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

My first reaction upon being invited to Denver’s Populus, which claims to be the country’s first “carbon-positive” hotel, for a press trip overlapping with its October ribbon-cutting, was, admittedly, one of skepticism. After all, the transport, construction, and hospitality industries are among the most damaging to the environment, and the 265-room hotel, designed by award-winning firm Studio Gang and developed by Urban Villages, covers all those bases. In recent years, “ecotourism” has been appropriately criticized—in fact, the now-ubiquitous term “greenwashing” for the marketing practice of deceptive corporate environmental claims originated from the hospitality industry itself: In 1983, environmentalist Jay Westerveld got the idea for the concept after visiting a Fiji hotel that asked guests to reuse their towels to “reduce ecological damage” while the property was in the middle of expanding. Therefore, the irony was not lost on me that the place purporting to be the first “carbon-positive” hotel in the U.S. would fly out 10 journalists on commercial jets for a brief media trip. (The irony is also not lost on me that I, someone who purports to care deeply about climate change, readily accepted said invitation.)

To interrogate Populus’s claim, we must first parse the term a bit further. The messaging of “carbon positive,” a newer, less definitive term than “carbon neutral,” is a bit murky. While carbon neutral means that any carbon emitted into the atmosphere from an activity is balanced by an equivalent amount removed through offsets or absorption, carbon positive (also called climate positive or, confusingly, carbon negative) refers to an entity that goes beyond carbon neutrality to create an environmental benefit by removing more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. In its press materials, Populus defines carbon positive as a “commitment to sequester more carbon in biomass and soil than the combined embodied and operational footprints of the building throughout its entire lifecycle.” (Note the use of “commitment.”)

Though Populus did report to be actually carbon positive at opening, there are two methods of measuring to consider: embodied carbon, which refers to the greenhouse gas emissions from the materials and construction of a building, and operational carbon, meaning the emissions associated with the energy used to operate a building. The hotel said its initial purchase of 7,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (mTCO2e) of certified carbon credits, in combination with the more than 70,000 new trees planted as part of its robust reforesting program with the U.S. Forestry Service, and its use of 100 percent renewable electricity from Colorado wind farms, offset its 6,675 mTCO2e of embodied carbon. Whether it can remain carbon positive operationally remains to be seen.

Still, there are inherent problems in focusing solely on carbon as a metric for measuring climate impact, in no small part due to the fact that the carbon credit market is an unregulated mess. Populus was intentional in seeking out certified, U.S.-based credits from partner organizations Grassroots Carbon, OneTreePlanted, and Terrapass, but Urban Villages CEO John Buerge acknowledges that carbon emissions aren’t the end-all-be-all of a building’s environmental impact. “Carbon ultimately became kind of the easiest or most consistent metric for us to judge performance across all aspects of the building,” Buerge says. “[But] when you look at the impact of real estate, it’s not just about the carbon released and the impact on climate change. It’s also about how the real estate industry is significantly affecting our ecological diversity.”

During my stay, I did my best to pin down whether the hotel really lives up to its claims to have a net-positive impact on the environment, in whatever myriad ways that can be calculated.

Monday

11:30 a.m.: Populus’s opening date has been pushed back several months, which means that when the 10 of us descend on the hotel for our October press trip, it’s the day before it even officially opens. I arrive at a 13-story white wedge rising adjacent to Denver’s Civic Center Park. Populus is a striking building; fluted concrete pocketed with oval windows of varied sizes. (Some Denverites have nicknamed it the “cheese grater,” which the Populus team, to their credit, has taken in stride). The facade’s defining visual feature is the patchwork of lidded eye–shaped windows intended to evoke the marks left on the bark of Aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) by the lower branches they shed while growing.

My first question before I even set foot inside, is, why, particularly for a building with aims to be carbon positive, was the much less carbon-intensive option of adaptive reuse—which both Studio Gang and Urban Villages have utilized for other projects—not pursued? In a phone call after my stay at Populus, Buerge tells me: “Absolutely the most sustainable building is the one you don’t have to build. But we also believe strongly that dense and vibrant urban environments are critical parts of a sustainable future.” The hotel’s downtown location—the former site of Colorado’s first gas station and, at the time of construction, a vacant lot—was critical to Urban Villages’ goal of revitalizing the area, but building right in the heart of Denver meant that the project also had to contend with existing city code and laws that can be out of pace with climate goals. For example, Populus had to seek out a variance from the city of Denver to not include any on-site parking, instead taking advantage of nearby existing, often-underutilized office parking lots for its valet service.

Another immediately confusing design choice was the building material: concrete, one of most carbon-intensive materials on the planet. (Its primary ingredient, cement, makes up nearly eight percent of the world’s total carbon emissions.) The concrete used for Populus is the proprietary ECOPact low-carbon mix by Holcim, which claims to have 30 percent lower carbon emissions compared to standard concrete. But why use concrete at all—particularly when mass timber, for example, is more sustainable, and often more durable?

On the phone, Buerge tells me timber was considered as an alternate material for the exterior. “We spent the first year in our design process trying to get entitled a mass-timber-built structure,” he says. But the existing building code did not allow timber for a 13-floor structure and the city was ultimately not comfortable issuing a variance. In the last year, however, perhaps spurred by the pressure from Populus, the city adjusted its code to allow for a future mass-timber build at that height. However, Buerge adds: “The reality is that mass timber can be a much more sustainable material than steel and concrete, but it can also be much worse if you’re not sourcing the timber in a sustainable way.” Anything at scale, and without proper regulation, can be deleterious.

11:45 a.m.: I step into the ground floor (or “forest floor”) lobby. Looking to the left I get a peek of one of the hotel’s two restaurants, Pasque, which takes up more than half of the open-plan lobby, and where light spills in from the floor-to-ceiling windows patterned in a dotted grid to deter bird strikes. (The upper-level windows, the team claims, are not similarly at risk of bird collisions.)

A wide staircase curves up from the lobby to a second-floor lounge and coworking space; above it, distressed ceiling slats are made of upcycled snow fences. I check in at the beautiful live-edge wood reception desk. (On our tour of the hotel the following day, I learn that the material for the desk was sourced locally, from a diseased cottonwood tree, and dry-kilned for 42 days, during which 243 gallons of water were removed from the tree and put back into the watershed.)

I have an empty coffee cup, and am surprised to find only one trash can in which to toss it—no recycling or compost in sight. It’s later explained to me that the waste sorting happens by hospitality staff: part of this is a logistical choice—trash often has to be re-sorted anyway—but part of it is an attempt to reduce that burden from guests’ shoulders. On the back end, all food waste is diverted from landfills through Populus’s BioGreen360 composter, and then distributed to local farms. What remains that can be recycled will be, while the rest goes into the trash. (Buerge acknowledges that while the goal is 100 percent landfill diversion, he doubts it will ever be possible to get there. However, he tells me that four days into the hotel’s opening, the main dumpster only had five bags of trash.)

12 p.m.: Upstairs, my room is replete with calming earth tones; the gray concrete ceiling, with some still-visible measurements scrawled in chalk, has been left exposed to cut down on material waste produced by wall coverings. I am disappointed to discover that my room is not one of the many containing a cushioned, hammock-shaped nook in the frame of those ocularesque windows.

7 p.m.: For our welcome drinks and dinner, I head up to the rooftop, where Populus’s second restaurant, Stellar Jay, has a more intimate vibe than Pasque, cast in low lighting and a darker color palette. The real star of the menu is the large indoor/outdoor bar and patio looking out over downtown Denver. 

The cocktails are delicious and dinner is tasty, though I am surprised by how rich in meat and dairy both restaurants are. While Populus works exclusively with local farms that practice regenerative ranching, plant-based diets are generally much gentler on the environment. The centerpiece for dinner at Stellar Jay is an impressive, if comically large bison shank, which even our table of a dozen has a hard time chipping away at. This may track for a “live-fire restaurant” like Stellar Jay, but even the next night when we dine at Pasque—pitched as “nature-inspired” cuisine—well over half of the menu contains animal products. It isn’t much of an issue for a cheese lover like me, but proves a little more challenging for the lifelong vegan in our group, who can only eat two dishes without modifications: a carrot starter and a squash appetizer.

Tuesday

11 a.m.: We meet in the lobby for our official press tour, which begins with an introduction to the “Reishi Tapestry,” an installation conceived by Wildman Chalmers Design, the firm behind Populus’s interiors, resembling dozens of stretched-leather rectangles hanging above the Pasque bar. I’d noticed it first on my arrival, but we only learn now that the sheets are in fact not animal skin, but instead engineered from biotech company MycoWorks’s flagship material, Reishi, which is made from mycelium, the root structure of fungi.

This detail sets the tone for the rest of the tour and reflects on a larger tension between the hotel’s strategy of marketing itself around its sustainability claims versus the lived experience of being there as a guest. It would be easy to never know the climate-friendly intention behind the details—the behind-the-scenes trash sorting, the salvaged wood reception desk, the year-round roof garden that helps with cooling and feeds pollinators—that contribute to the environmental commitments its advertising is centered around. There is virtually no information on these design elements available at the actual hotel: one must comb through press materials, or receive a tour, or ask. If you cut down a diseased tree, return 243 gallons of water to the watershed, and fashion the trunk into a hotel desk, but no guest is around to see it, do you get the (carbon) credit?

11:30 a.m.: Our press group is guided into one of the guest rooms with a window hammock that I finally get to try out and deem sufficiently cozy. We learn that the windows (and their “lids,” which help with shading), were designed to maximize energy efficiency by balancing the admission of enough daylight while avoiding heat loss. Other elements that aid in reducing the structure’s energy use include a rainscreen that helps heat the building in the winter and cool it during summer.

After our guided tour—and even more so after my later phone call with Buerge—I have far richer detail than I had on my first day, and somewhat less skepticism. But this new layer of information, one that most guests won’t be privy to, makes me think that the hotel’s messaging could use some work: is the “carbon positive” proclamation intended to be a draw, or do they want it to take a back seat to the guest experience? Do they feel a responsibility to educate consumers, or do they seek more to act as a model for other developers who care about their environmental impact? It seems Urban Villages is actually more focused on the latter, on proving that it is possible to drastically reduce a corporation’s carbon footprint and ecological impact without notably impacting the guest experience. As for education: Buerge says the team “wanted to be very careful about inundating a guest with data,” but there are plans to put up a video on the website and perhaps implement QR codes around the hotel for more information. (And we know how everyone loves a QR code.)

Populus also has a public-facing version of its software-tracking program up on its website so that guests can continue to hold the hotel accountable. Buerge stresses that the process is ongoing: “It’s not about necessarily saying, well, we just, you know, we emitted 500 tons of carbon this year, so we’re going to buy 500 carbon credits and we’re done. That’s the easy button. Our strategy is we want to be actually out there knowing what we’re doing, investing in the right things, reinforcing what we believe, and being very transparent about it.” (Shortly after the hotel opened, it arrived at its first test when Denver Public Radio reported that a visit to the Gunnison, Colorado, site of Populus’s offset forest revealed that 80 percent of the Englemann spruce seedlings planted the year prior had died, meaning the hotel will need to adjust its strategies to fulfill the hotel’s climate commitments.)

Thursday

10:30 a.m.: Throughout the trip, I’ve been acutely aware of Denver as the entry point to this natural world the hotel is trying to protect. It’s a city full of people who love the outdoors, after all. As my Uber chugs east along an uninspired stretch of I-70 to the Denver Airport, I spot in the rearview mirror those parts of Colorado I didn’t spend much time in during this visit: the Rockies, the vast public lands and national forests that inspired the Populus team. I got one little taste, on Wednesday night, when the press team brought us to EDM producer and DJ Zedd’s concert, which all of us admitted to only attending because we wanted to see Red Rocks, and where we seemed to be the oldest attendees by over a decade. (We stayed for the two openers and left 15 minutes into the main act—sorry Zedd!) I will have to come back in the fall again, see the aspens change, maybe check out the Gunnison site myself.

Ultimately, anyone working in, or passionate about, travel or hospitality or design or architecture, will forever have to bump up against the inherent contradiction of “ecotravel.” I chafe at the idea that any new hospitality development could really have a net-positive impact on the environment, but it feels important and somewhat hopeful that there is active internal pressure on those industries to continue to improve and innovate.

Still, as I make it through security and head to my gate, I realize I never found out if the Populus team had a plan for offsetting the journalists’ flights.