Just imagine enjoying luxury spa treatments while you’re traveling for business or vacation and still helping combat global warming.

That’s the image Fairmont Hotels & Resorts wants its customers and business partners to picture. It’s part of the luxury hotel chain’s Green Partnership Program to not only boost business, but cut operating costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well.

The chain has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 20% below 2006 levels by 2013. Fairmont’s touting this strategy because tracking GHG emissions is becoming the major benchmark for its industry, and the chain intends to position itself as an industry leader.

To help meet its CO2 reduction goal, Fairmont just adopted a Green IT strategy to attack energy usage. By the end of the year, Fairmont hotels will:

• automatically power down computer workstations and laptops after one hour of inactivity, which will earn the chain GHG reduction credits of 1,356 tons of CO2 a year
• divert electronic wastes from disposal to recycling in markets that support e-waste recycling
• develop donation standards to make sure Fairmont hotels and spas send e-wastes to qualified and respected recycling companies and charities
• adopt a green procurement policy to only buy products that are certified under the Energy Star or Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool programs, and
• partner with service companies that adopt Extended Product Responsibility programs.

Fairmont’s Green IT announcement is here.

The hotel chain has also adopted a green laundry program, using an ozone disinfection system that reduced energy costs by 20%. The Laundry Ozone Purification System is a non-invasive and passive injection technology that Fairmont says has dramatically reduced water, sewer, gas and electric bills at its Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa in Sonoma Valley, CA.

Details about Fairmont’s ozone laundry program are here.

Tags: CO2, energy star, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, GHG, Green IT