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Vail — Bob Trotter, general manager of the Vail Valley’s Westin Riverfront Resort, has been in the hospitality business a long time. He’ll be the first to acknowledge it’s not the most environmentally-efficient industry in the world. But his latest job is different.

The Westin Riverfront Resort & Spa in Avon was built from the ground up to be as green as possible and proved it earlier this year when it officially received a “silver” designation from the Leadership in Energy Efficient Design program. The Westin claims to be the first hotel in the state to earn that certification.

Getting certified wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that much more expensive.

“It probably added 2 to 5 percent to our construction costs,” Trotter said.

But getting certified required a lot of planning, and, in some cases, special arrangements with suppliers.

For instance, the wallboard coming from the American Gypsum drywall factory in Gypsum is generally shipped to warehouses in Denver and elsewhere. To help the Westin comply with a LEED requirement for getting materials as close to the job site as possible, the developers struck a deal with the factory to ship drywall directly from Gypsum to Avon.

Builders had to find roof tiles made from recycled tires, and used a water-treatment system in the swimming pool that uses salt, not chlorine, to purify the water.

Beyond the building, getting LEED certified also meant the Westin had to restore a stretch of riverbank and put in a garden condo owners and the Avondale restaurant can use.

Cleaning a ‘brownfield’

The story is a little different in Vail. There, Vail Resorts’ proposed Ever Vail project will put a gondola, condos, retail shops and more onto a site west of Lionshead. Part of that property, though, is an old gas station with contaminated soil, what people in the sustainability business call a “brownfield.” That will have to be cleaned up before anything else can be built.

While the Westin earned its silver certification, Vail Resorts has stated Ever Vail will earn the program’s “platinum” designation.

Vail Resorts spokeswoman Kristin Kenney Williams said seeking LEED certification for its latest proposed project is an offshoot of how the company does business these days.

“It’s a huge commitment on our part, how we can incorporate environmental stewardship into a real estate project,” Kenney Williams said. “The company’s vision was evolving and the thinking was ‘let’s be a leader in this.’”

Kenney Williams said earning the “platinum” designation will involve everything the Westin did, and then some. The biggest, perhaps, is putting 48 employee housing units — 80 percent of what town regulations will require — into the mountainside project, so employees won’t have to commute.