Green Seal is a non-profit corporation that creates science-based environmental standards and certifications in various sectors (cleaning products, paper, lodging properties, restaurants etc.) to empower consumers, purchasers, and companies to create a more sustainable world. Since it was first published in 1999, the GS-33 standard for lodging properties has represented environmental leadership in the industry, which is why the City of Los Angeles, the Tourism and Convention Board and the City of Los Angeles’s Better Buildings Challenge (LABBC) chose to partner with Green Seal as the City's official green certifier. Green Seal is the only certifier that requires a third-party independent scientific process as a prerequisite to certification.
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Green Seal’s GS-33 certification has three tiers of sustainable practices for hotels to achieve - Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Currently, Green Seal has 56 certified hotels in the United States (with seven located in the Los Angeles area), and that number continues to grow. By developing a model for Green Seal, the StayGreen project team will demonstrate the environmental impacts of GS-33 specifically from the operational changes that hotels make to meet certification requirements, including efficiency upgrades to lighting, office equipment, and HVAC units. This model could then be used to project different scenarios into the future to examine how different certification levels for a range of hotels could affect greenhouse gas emissions.