Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Going Green:

Big tourism entities gear up with ‘green teams’

Some day, Hugh Sinnock hopes solar panel suppliers will be standing in line to put their photovoltaic units on the roof of the Las Vegas Convention Center to prove their products are capable of supplying large volumes of electricity to the utility grid.

“We’re the Yankee Stadium of convention centers, and I’m hoping we can leverage that to get solar providers to use our building as kind of a high-profile proving ground,” said Sinnock, director of customer experience at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and a spokesman for its green initiative.

The Convention Center certainly could be a showcase for solar technology considering that more than 6 million people visit the building each year and the facility will be undergoing a major face-lift.

While the authority’s year-old green team has lofty goals, for now it’s satisfied with the extraordinary 50 percent recycling recovery rate it has for the thousands of tons of materials that go in and out of the buildings managed by what is recognized as the nation’s leading convention and visitors bureau.

The LVCVA and a high-profile airline in Las Vegas, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, are two tourism industry leaders that have used volunteer committees to help develop environmental policies that are leading to major recycling and conservation efforts that are Earth-friendly and benefit them financially.

The stakes are high for Sinnock’s team of 22 people who meet every four to six weeks to discuss and implement new conservation and recycling plans. More and more customers are inquiring about the authority’s green initiatives, preferring to do business with organizations that share their environmental philosophy.

“It started out with awareness,” Sinnock said. “We wanted to make our co-workers more aware of what they could do to conserve, recycle and save energy.”

The convention bureau started with its own minitrade show for employees. NV Energy, Southwest Gas, UNLV and the LVCVA’s Aramark food contractor had exhibits and provided information.

“More than half our employees attended, and we got a lot of positive feedback on it,” Sinnock said. “That’s important, because now, for a lot of the things we do, our employees will consider the environmental implications.”

With the green attitude taking hold, employees began developing all kinds of conservation and recycling ideas. Because of the nature of the convention and trade show business, recycling trash became a priority.

Every show that moves in and out of the Convention Center or Cashman Center near downtown Las Vegas generates a broad mix of packaging materials and exhibition booth construction materials.

The authority’s recycling efforts were tracked for the first time in 2008, so the organization doesn’t have any comparative data. But the first year of operation produced some impressive results: The LVCVA recovered and recycled 554.7 tons of cardboard, 293.7 tons of plastic materials, 233.4 tons of carpet pad, 223.4 tons of carpet, 130.5 tons of paper products, 97.9 tons of miscellaneous metals, 65.3 tons of wood and 33.6 tons of bottles.

The more than 1,600 tons of materials represents about half of the 3,263 tons of materials thrown away during the year.

“Nobody generates the amount of trash that we do, but I’d put us against anybody in terms of recycling,” Sinnock said.

In addition, the authority converted 27,000 gallons of cleaning products of the 30,000 used in 2008 to sustainable products and it continues to test new products to make the other 3,000 gallons more eco-friendly.

Employees are doing a better job of turning out lights that don’t need to be left on and shutting down computers overnight.

“We have 350 to 400 computers, so little things like that all add up,” he said.

Southwest Airlines, meanwhile, also has a volunteer green team, formed last year and headed by one of the airline’s corporate spokeswomen, Marilee McInnis.

About 30 volunteers meet once a month to discuss conservation, recycling and proposing ways to save resources. McInnis said each Southwest station also has its own green team and the Las Vegas station has about 15 members.

“Our team has members who are passionate about the environment,” McInnis said. “For us, it may have been a little easier to get started because one of Southwest’s core values over the years has been efficiency and a lot of what we’ve done is a matter of doing some of the things we’ve always done better.”

Southwest’s green team is doing much of the same kind of conservation and recycling as the LVCVA. It’s also strong in volunteerism in its respective communities.

In 2007 Southwest recycled 92 tons of paper and cardboard at its Dallas headquarters. The airline also decided to serve DejaBlue water on its flights. DejaBlue is served in cans, which are easier to recycle than plastic bottles. In 2007 the airline recycled 2.4 million cans from its flights.

But conserving fuel is a big part of Southwest’s efforts.

For the airline industry, one of the keys to savings is to stretch every gallon of jet fuel and many of the initiatives undertaken by Southwest have been around since the airline was founded.

Early on Southwest determined that the best way to be profitable would be to keep each plane in the air as much as possible. As a result, the airline developed a system of quick turnarounds whenever a plane is loading and unloading passengers.

In 1972 the startup carrier set a standard for turning around flights in 10 minutes. Today, with a larger fleet and more crowded airports, the turnaround time is closer to 25 minutes — still tops in the industry.

The quick turnarounds reduce the amount of fuel burned when a plane is on the ground. Today most of Southwest’s stations have electric power units that planes can plug into while on the ground to save fuel.

The airline also was one of the first to use single-engine taxiing and in 2003 added a noticeable feature on its planes, blended winglets.

Winglets are the 6-foot extensions on the end of each wing. They reduce drag and increase lift, thus saving fuel. Southwest estimates that in 2007 the winglets saved 27 million gallons of fuel, the equivalent of taking 47,000 cars off the road for a year.

Southwest is a point-to-point carrier as opposed to a hub-and-spoke operation, meaning that passengers don’t have to fly to a hub airport to get to their destinations.

Southwest has invested in software that enables the airline to plot its most fuel-efficient routes. In addition, the company put lightweight life vests under seats enabling the company to fly short distances over water, further reducing distances flown. In 2007 the airline estimated that overwater flying saved it 2 million gallons of fuel.

McInnis said more conservation measures are on the horizon for Southwest. The airline is keeping abreast of alternative fuel research for jets, and the company has a close relationship with Boeing, which is developing a more fuel efficient model, the 787 Dreamliner, constructed of composite plastic.

Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly has said that while Southwest has no plans to fly 787s, the airline has had discussions with Boeing about someday using similar technology for a 737 model.

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