PISCATAWAY, N.J.—Expanding its efforts to help plumbers provide value to their customers, American Standard has launched two online tools that promote water conservation. The new Water Savings Calculator and Rebate Locator also help educate people about the benefits of water and energy conservation.

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, COLO.—FoodServiceWarehouse.com launched its Going Green Program, an industry-vetted program aimed at helping commercial kitchens cope with the costs and complexities of going green. FoodServiceWarehouse.com is dedicated to helping commercial kitchens slash energy costs.

VISTA, CALIF.—Waterless Co. LLC is reporting a surge in both sales orders and requests for sales information after the company introduced a new line of soybean urinals approximately four weeks ago. According to Niki Bradley, marketing manager for the company, she did expect some excitement with the introduction, “but nothing like what has happened in the past few weeks.”

HOUSTON—How do you get a laundry facility that covers 27,000 square feet into the basement of a downtown Houston, Texas hotel? It’s easy; you build the hotel on top of the laundry. Most hotel laundries are put in as an afterthought to the construction of the hotel and as such have limited space for equipment. The laundry facility located in the basement of the Hilton Americas-Houston was included in the initial building of the structure and exists as the largest laundry facility in the United States Hilton family of hotels. The massive equipment, including two tunnel washers, was put into place prior to the construction of the upper 24 floors of the building, allowing the hotel to have an on-property laundry facility that rivals most commercial laundries.

CLEVELAND, OHIO—Green Lodging News has added its tenth case study to its Vendor Case Studies section. The case study focuses on the 480-room Hilton Palacio del Rio hotel and how it was able to reduce its water consumption by 6 million gallons in the first eight months after Caroma’s Sydney dual flush high efficiency toilets were installed.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Seven lodging properties and several Fortune 100 companies, including Hewlett Packard, Lockheed Martin, and Xerox, are among the 96 facilities that have renewed their membership in EPA's National Environmental Performance Track program. Among the lodging properties: the Pinewood Cove Resort.

PORTLAND, ORE.— Placing it among exclusive company on an international scale, Portland’s Avalon Hotel & Spa has achieved the Northwest’s first LEED certification of an existing hotel building. The Avalon, a luxury boutique hotel and spa, joins the ranks of only nine other hotels in the world to have achieved LEED certification and is the second existing hotel building in the world to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) coveted Silver rating. The Avalon is located in Portland, Ore., a location that is consistently ranked as the greenest city in America.

CLEVELAND, OHIO—Hasek Communications, the Cleveland, Ohio-based publisher of Green Lodging News, welcomes HD Supply Hospitality Solutions as a Founding Sponsor. HD Supply is committed to doing business in a manner that is responsible to its associates, customers and the environment.

LAPU-LAPU, PHILIPPINES—An invention that reuses the water used to cool ice machine compressors has allowed Hilton Cebu Resort & Spa in the Philippines to recycle hundreds of thousands of liters of water each year and save on its water bill. The invention, a simple piping system, is attached to three ice machines in the hotel, capturing the water used to cool the compressors and then sending this “grey water” to be reused in the hotel’s flushing tanks, rather than simply washing down the drain. The system was created as part of a water saving project led by Hilton Cebu’s chief engineer Antonio Dizon and team members Junar Penalosa and Gaspar Pasucal, who were looking at ways to boost the resort’s environmental efforts.

HILLSBORO, ORE.—Caroma, a leader in dual flush toilets and bathroom sinks, has introduced its newest high efficiency dual flush toilet (HET): Sydney Low Profile. The Low Profile is ideal for installations that want to conserve water and require a shorter toilet due to space restrictions, such as under a counter or a grab bar in ADA installations.