America’s first ‘carbon positive’ hotel comes to Denver – but do its climate claims stack up?

Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.

Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado.

Related: The parched metropolis: can eco architecture save LA from megadrought?

But when accounting for all of the waste, energy consumption and transportation of goods required of a luxury hotel with two restaurants – not to mention the fact that buildings alone account for 39% of greenhouse gas emissions – will your $300 to $500 purchase of a room at Populus really help fight climate change?

“There are a lot of layers to this,” says Joel Hartter, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor who specializes in corporate sustainability. “On paper, it looks great. But it would take a lot of research to verify those claims.”

These days, claims of “carbon neutrality” from giant corporations such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Walmart, IKEA, Microsoft and many more are commonplace. But often, that merely means using their deep pockets to purchase “carbon credits” –paying for reforestation or renewable energy projects to offset carbon emissions – which have often been discredited and been found to actually worsen the climate crisis.

Populus goes one step further in its boast of being “carbon positive”, not just offsetting the hotel’s carbon footprint but actually taking out far more carbon than it puts in – a promise few businesses would dare to make, for both financial and publicity reasons.

As a term, however, “carbon positive” can be linguistically confusing (“carbon negative” would be literally more accurate), and with no clear definition of what “carbon positive” means, there are no metrics by which to determine its validity.

Jon Buerge is the president of Urban Villages, the sustainable development company behind Populus. He defines carbon positive as “sequestering more carbon out of the atmosphere than would ever be emitted over the lifetime of the project”.

But just how much CO₂ emissions can you attribute to any one project? Hartter admits it’s a challenge.

“You have to account for several factors: direct emissions from the hotel itself, such as HVAC systems and company vans; emissions from purchased electricity that powers the building, including lighting, heating and cooling; and indirect emissions, like the transportation of goods, the carbon footprint of construction materials, waste disposal and guest travel. In this case, you must also consider site preparation, building materials, supply chains and everything brought into the hotel – from beds and furniture to TVs. You also have to think about the timescale over which offsetting occurs,” he explains. “It’s complex, and this is what many of the world’s largest companies are currently grappling with.”

Buerge is eager to unpack all the ways that Populus has reduced its carbon footprint both through the construction of the building – using recycled materials, low-carbon concrete and only 100% renewable energy in its operations.

“These goals led to some pretty unique approaches to hospitality,” says Buerge. “We decided not to have any onsite parking. One hundred per cent of our food products are sourced locally, and all food waste will be turned into compost and returned to those same farms.” He says the hotel also utilized eco-friendly materials such as beetle-kill wood, fly ash concrete (which emits far less carbon than traditional concrete, yet has never been used in a commercial building before) and leather made from reishi mushrooms.

“We’ve talked a lot about biophilic design, resembling nature,” says Buerge of the hotel’s interior. “It’s made to resemble a walk through the woods.”

However, it’s their promise to plant one spruce tree in Colorado for every guest that stays at Populus that their carbon positive balance sheet hinges upon. A decades-long beetle epidemic has destroyed millions of acres of trees throughout the US west, contributing to outbreaks of wildfires and devastating whole ecosystems. In pursuit of removing carbon from the atmosphere via new trees, Buerge collaborated with the US Forest Service, who directed them toward beetle-resistant spruce trees.

Buerge says they have already planted 70,000 spruce trees throughout Colorado’s National Wilderness Preservation System to offset emissions accrued in the building process of the hotel, with another 20,000 to be planted this year.

“We’re not just buying carbon credits, we’re not even just planting trees,” he says. “We’re reforesting Colorado forests.”

Related: ‘Reform or go out of business,’ carbon offsetting industry told

Jay Arehart, an architectural engineering professor at University of Colorado Boulder, has been following the Populus project for a long time and is impressed with its creators’ approach to a low-carbon development and the legitimacy of their ambitious offset goals, which he says are very rare in commercial real estate, since the construction of buildings comes with such a high carbon price tag.

“It’s a great pilot program that could definitely set a precedent,” he says. “When thinking about net-zero goals that companies might have – or are forced to have – this is a project we could point to as evidence that it can be done.”

While Hartter is cynical about companies over-relying on carbon offsets – it’s “like eating KFC every day, then paying someone in Florida to eat vegetables”, he says – he is optimistic about Urban Village’s new hotel. “They’re doing the right things: table-to-farm foods, solutions for waste, lining the sidewalks with trees, which will reduce heat.”

But, he warns, failure to live up to their claims could come back to bite them. “Millennials and gen Z often align their values to their pocketbooks, and their brand loyalty is based on a company’s sustainable values,” he says. “I really hope Populus’s aims stand up beyond just marketing.”