As you may have read, 1GreenProduct.com recently downshifted from a daily to thrice weekly publishing schedule (Monday, Wednesday and Friday).We did this in order to have a little more time for our secondary activities like eating and sleeping.
And yet, from time to time, just to keep our readers on their collective toes, we've decided to offer supplementary Green Travel content on occasional Tuesdays and Thursdays!
Why pick Tuesdays and Thursdays? Well, not only are those the only free days on our weekly publishing schedule, but the writer in us also likes the alliteration of Travel Tuesdays or Travel Thursdays...
We know that travel often entails some amount of environmental pollution, but we believe that many people do have a practically irrepressible human urge to travel and that the best solution would be not to suppress that urge, but to mitigate the ecological damage by choosing places and properties that do their part to protect the environment.
We hope that our readers who want to learn about eco-friendly products will also enjoy finding out about Green hotels and eco-friendly destinations like the Ireland's newly designated "Greenbox" region pictured above.
With such introductory fanfare out of the way, we present the first ever edition of 1GreenProduct.com's Green travel roundup:
- We just got back from a trip to Chicago and found ourselves might impressed not only with the vaunted friendliness of the locals, but also with the profusion of trees and flowers blooming around town, particularly on Michigan Avenue. It turns out that Chicago is doing its best to live up to its official motto of "city in a garden".
In 2004, Chicago opened the fantastic 24.5-acre Millennium Park right in the heart of the city. Convinced that green roofs offer numerous environmental benefits including better air quality, energy conservation and stormwater runoff reduction, Chicago now claims to have more green roof space (295,000 square feet and growing) than any other city in North America. Even City Hall has a rooftop garden containing more than 20,000 plants!
A beautiful bike path along Lake Michigan encourages many Chicagoans to bike to work (at least when the weather is not arctic), and the city is doing plenty to encourage this trend by creating an extensive network of bike lanes and trails. By 2015, Chicago hopes to "make bicycling an integral part of daily life in Chicago." According to the city, there are already more than 10,500 
city-owned bike racks in Chicago, more than in any other U.S. city. Chicago also is home to a spiffy new McDonald's Cycle Center with 24-hour secure bicycle parking, showers, lockers and bicycle rental and repair services.
We had the pleasure of staying at the Conrad Chicago while we were in town. The hotel is redesigning its lobby to incorporate energy-efficient LED backlighting and detailing. Within the hotel itself, much of the lighting has already been switched over from incandescent to CFL or LED, typically reducing lighting energy needs by nearly 70%. The hotel says that it actively recycles paper, cardboard, plastic bottles and light bulbs. In the kitchen, the Conrad Chicago says it's working to reduce the carbon footprint of its ingredients while incorporating local and organic ingredients where possible. And in a move that might please our friends over at Tomato Casual, the Conrad Chicago apparently hosts an employee tomato garden on its rooftop!
- From Chicago, we head south to Greensboro, North Carolina to bring you news of the Proximity Hotel that opened last November. From its solar hot water heaters to its innovative Otis Gen2 elevator that captures energy and feeds it back into the building's electrical grid, the 
Proximity is shooting for Gold or Platinum LEED status. You can read the whole list of Proxmity's eco-practices yourself, but some of our favorites include the use of recycled building materials (i.e. reinforced steel containing 90% post consumer recycled content), the water-saving Kohler plumbing fixtures, the low-VOC paints and carpeting, and guest room shelves built from walnut SkyBlend, which Proximity describes as "particleboard made from 100% post-industrial recycled wood pulp with no added formaldehyde."
If you're headed to Greensboro or nearby Winston-Salem, we'd strongly encourage you to look into staying at the Proximity Hotel. Rates for August seem to average less than $200 through Proximity's website and reviews on TripAdvisor are mostly outstanding.
- Ireland is already known as the Emerald Isle thanks to its enchanting, verdant landscape. I recently received notice from Tourism Ireland about a pristine corner of northwestern Ireland n newly labeled the Greenbox. Encompassing six counties (Fermanagh, Leitrim, West Cavan, North Sligo, South Donegal and Northwest Monaghan), the Greenbox is chock full of beautiful natural attractions. For example, the Benbulben rock formation in Sligo apparently has the only arctic alpine orchard in the world left over from the last Ice Age.
While visiting the Greenbox, you can take a hot bath in sustainably-harvested seaweed at SOAK (the seaweed is recycled into fertilizer once you've finished bathing) or practice your Side Camel Pose and enjoy organic food at the Clare Island yoga retreat. Looking for something a bit more upscale? The 4-star Brooklodge & Wells Spa offers mud baths, an on-property organic pub serving organic brews and the only certified organic restaurant in Ireland, The Strawberry Tree.
For more ideas on great green Ireland trips, check out Eco Escapes: Ireland by Catherine Mack. Nearly half of Mack's suggestions are apparently located in the Greenbox. You can also contact Tourism Ireland directly at 1-800-223-6470 or visit them online.
- Finally, we have to mention a new hotel in Brooklyn (our hometown). How new is this place? It's so new that they had to name it the Nu Hotel! (Insert rimshot.)
Other than being cool by virtue of its Brooklyn-ness, we like the Nu for its clean design, the fact that it apparently has hammocks in some rooms and its eco-friendly characteristics including the use of organic bedding materials.
Nu's media reps say the hotel's custom furnishings have been built from FSC-certified sustainably-harvested teak wood. We like the fact that Nu chose to use sustainable, renewable and biodegradable cork flooring. From what we hear, harvesting the cork bark from cork oak trees doesn't even hurt the tree. Oh and cork also happens to have sound-dampening qualities, which should help keep the peace since we hear that Brooklynites (and their visitors) can get pretty wild... 
Room rates at the Nu average around $250 night - more pricey than Greensboro maybe, but still plenty reasonable for NYC. At prices like these, we would be tempted to say, "Out with the old and in with the Nu," but we already used up our daily rimshot.
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