Last night’s 79^th annual Academy Awards were hailed as the first green awards in the events storied history.  So what exactly do they mean by green?  We here at Informed Building were curious and decided to look into this.

The Oscar’s greening was more extensive than just awarding Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth ’ two Oscars, one for best documentary feature and the other for Melissa Etheridge’s song “I Need to Wake Up.”

In collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council , a non-partisan environmental and advocacy organization, green eco-friendly planning was used in many aspects of the planning and production of the Oscars.  In what appears to be the first step in a long term green plan for the event, organizers sought to reduce the awards' ecological footprint by choosing to use recycled supplies, recycling and waste reduction practices and green friendly vendors.

Most intriguing perhaps is the Oscars’ decision to offset pollution from the show and related events by purchasing carbon credits .  These carbon credits essentially allow an individual or organization to..................