As the snow begins to melt, winter’s trash begins to emerge. Fast food bags and plastic water bottles lie in muddy puddles everywhere. Gross.

Time to mull over the best eco-friendly hotel options for traveling this spring. Lately I’ve been loving IStayGreen.org, a website devoted to helping members travel and stay green in hotels all over the world. (Membership is free.) They audit hotels on their green-ness, and members weigh in with reviews.

I’m also loving all the U.S. hotels currently holding or pursuing LEED certification. Right now, there are about 30, with many more awaiting confirmation of their applications.

My five favorite “Green Hotels” this year:

Hotel Felix—Chicago
Chicago is one of the nation’s leading “green” cities, and Hotel Felix is the city’s first hotel designed for a LEED Silver rating. (Silver’s the best you can get.) I made note of this fabulous hotel back in November. I love the paperless front desk, the eco-friendly cleaning supplies, the efforts to reduce non-biodegradable landfill junk, and the in-progress “Green Roof” project.

Orchard Garden Hotel—San Francisco
San Francisco’s “purely ‘green’ boutique hotel”, and California’s first LEED-certified hotel, the Orchard Garden has a key card energy control system, in-room recycling bins, and locally made organic bath amenities. Even the sheets and bedding are partly recycled. The hotel’s next mission: 80 – 90 percent diversion from landfills.

Proximity Hotel—Greensboro, North Carolina
Proximity holds the highest LEED rating for a hotel—Platinum. Built to use 40% less energy and 30% less water than a comparable hotel, it also has an elevator that captures its own energy and feeds it back into the building’s electrical grid. (It’s the only elevator system in the U.S. like it.) In addition, 100 solar panels on the roof generate energy to heat water. Sun-sational!

Len Foote Hike Inn—Dawsonville, Georgia
The first LEED-certified hotel in the country, it’s the kind of place that advertises “hot showers” and “odor-free toilets”. Umm, this place is not owned and operated by a Hilton. (Actually, it’s operated by the Appalachian Education and Recreation Services and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and is accessible only by a five-mile hike.) But it is the kind of place your family will learn from. You’re going to sleep in bunk beds. All your meals will be served family style at a big table. And all your organic waste will be composted using vermiculture, otherwise known as red wiggler worm beds. (You don’t have to see them if you don’t want to.)

The Palazzo—Las Vegas
It’s the largest building in the world to receive LEED certification, and four times bigger than the second largest LEED-certified structure. The steel is made from 95 percent recycled content. For the water-starved desert, the Palazzo has drip-irrigation and planters to reduce run-off, and moisture sensors to prevent unnecessary watering. Non-thirsty turf grass replaces real grass. All swimming pools are heated with an expansive solar pool heating system, and in the summer, the excess solar energy is directed to the hotel’s hot water system.

As Paris Hilton herself might say, “That’s hot.”

As Meredith says: Let’s travel responsibly.

—Meredith