Paradise Is a Parking Lot

Back in the day, Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise to put up a parking lot. Now a Canadian firm is claiming its parking lot will be paradise.

Well, maybe not paradise. But there, beneath the roar and jet exhaust of Denver International Airport, will be the “world’s greenest parking facility.”

That’s right, folks, we’ve gotten to the point in the green revolution when we’re building green parking lots at a den of environmental iniquity (also known as an airport), and if you think of it, that’s great. It’s like planting wildflowers beside highways; or running hybrid buses in the exhaust-choked canyons of Chicago or Manhattan; or building super-energy-efficient buildings in smog-shrouded Los Angeles. In other words, at least it’s something.

Here are the details.

Greenscape Capital Group, a Vancouver, British Columbia, firm that invests in companies in the green space and operates Green.Switch, an energy retrofitting company, plans to bring online what it’s calling the greenest parking facility in the world. It will be a 4,200-stall lot, called GreenPark DIA, at Denver International Airport, the fifth-busiest airport in the United States, and the nation’s largest airport by land size. Green.Switch will own 90 percent of the lot; its operator ProPark America, will own the other 10 percent.

But while the firm is trumpeting this lot in Denver, it will only be the first of many lots the company hopes to retrofit to higher environmental standards, and a corporate model for similar projects at other airports.

Construction of the lot will be to LEED Gold standards, meaning it will meet the second-highest Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard meted out by the independent U.S. Green Building Council.

Shuttle vans from the parking lot will use alternative fuels; lighting will be provided by solar and wind energy; pavement will be porous to prevent the often toxic runoff that comes with most parking lots; natural landscaping will surround the lot; and GreenPark DIA can harvest landfill methane and convert it to natural gas to meet the facility’s energy needs.

But what’s better is that this parking lot isn’t a charity. It’s a business, and average projected net operating income is expected to be $5.1 million a year in two to 10 years.

Who says you can’t be green and make money too? And who knows, maybe someday all those greenhouse-gas-belching airplanes zooming overhead will run on environmentally friendly biofuel. After all, that’s been tested too.

One question, though. Will parking spaces come with chargers for your electric cars?