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Robert Lane, 91, traces the start of his environmental activism to 2006, when he and a friend screened An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary on the climate crisis, at his continuing care community near New Haven, Conn.

“We found quite a bit of interest in it,” says the retired Harvard political scientist. “Residents wanted to take action, starting with where they live.”

Take action they did. They formed a “Green Council” to explore how they could make the Whitney Center a more eco-friendly human habitat. Management at the retirement home made it clear that dollars and cents had to be conserved along with the environment, Lane says, so the Green Council looks for ways to save both. “We are always pressing management to take certain action,” Lane says. “They’ve been wonderful on recycling.”

Today, the Whitney Center is expanding and, to the satisfaction of Green Council members, the new construction will be built according to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) guidelines, a national standard for green construction established by the U.S. Green Building Council.

“The next stop is to reduce driving,” says Lane. “We have to learn to think not in terms of money, but of carbon.”

Rising green tide

Lane and the Whitney Center’s Green Council are not alone. An activist fire has kindled in the bellies of Americans over the age of 50. It’s an activism born of increasing concern for the environment—for what sort of Earth they will leave future generations and for what makes their own surroundings healthy to live in now. Many of them had recycled and tried to conserve fossil fuels while living in their own homes. Now, after moving to retirement and continuing care communities, they’re forming green committees with like-minded neighbors and blazing a bright green path.

Beyond working with the Whitney Center to step up recycling and energy efficiency, the Green Council reached out to other continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs), wrote a handbook on conservation for CCRCs and even created the National Senior Conservation Corps, a network of about 40 retirement homes across 10 states. Last year the council won a Connecticut Climate Change Leadership Award.

Whether to cut energy costs or to better position themselves in the increasingly competitive housing marketplace for the over-50 set—or even to help save the planet—developers and property managers are jumping on the green train, too. According to the U.S. Green Building Council, only one senior-housing developer registered to seek LEED certification for new construction each year from 2005 through 2007. In 2008, seven did.

Atria Senior Living Group filed two of those registrations. One of the biggest providers of older-adult housing and assisted living facilities, Atria’s 120 communities are home to about 13,000 residents. “Though the percentage of seniors inquiring about this issue has been relatively small, it appears to be increasing each month,” says Randall Smith, Atria’s vice president for redevelopment operations. “We have also experienced greater numbers of adult children asking about green building initiatives when touring our communities with or for their parents.”

Indeed, developers who build for older Americans may soon have to go green to stay in business. “The pig coming through the python is the boomer generation,” says LEED-accredited builder Joe Wagman of Wagman Construction in York, Pa. “Within a few years, your new prospective resident is going to show up and ask first, ‘What’s your bandwidth?’ and second, ‘What’s your carbon footprint?’ ”

Green plans

So what are they doing to go green?

“Everyone starts with the light bulbs,” Robert Lane says. Switching from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent is no mean feat on an institutional scale, however. The nonprofit Mennonite Home Communities, a continuing care facility in Lancaster, Pa., with about 900 residents, started switching to fluorescent lights a couple of years ago to save both energy and money. “We have a community of residents saying, let’s reduce our energy use, reduce our carbon footprint,” says J. Nelson Kling, president of the nonprofit. Kling estimates that a single building might have 1,000 sconces illuminating the hallways. Replacing bulbs across the campus took time but has saved thousands of dollars in electricity costs, he says.

After replacing light bulbs, the focus usually turns to recycling. Then comes the switch—or at least the desire to switch—to natural cleaning products. The cleaning agents in most commercially available products contain caustic chemicals that can irritate tissue in the sinuses and lungs. Regular exposure to these chemicals can further compromise the respiratory systems of those with chronic pulmonary obstruction, asthma and other respiratory diseases. Housekeeping staff can also suffer from the constant exposure.

But it can be a tough change to make. One director of a California CCRC says he has yet to find a natural product that can clean adequately. “It’s a tossup between respiratory health and hygiene,” he says. “We haven’t found the panacea.”

Then come the projects with bigger conservation impact but correspondingly bigger price tags: high-efficiency appliances, double-pane windows, low-flow showers, sinks and toilets, rainwater irrigation, native-plant landscaping, and the biggest investment of all—getting off the power grid.

Expenses were on the minds of the residents of Valle Verde, a continuing care community in Santa Barbara, Calif., when the managers decided to look at ways to reduce energy dependency, says Ron Schaefer, executive director. “At first our residents were worried that it would cost them money. But we had some easy successes early on with things that didn’t cost a lot of money, and we got some momentum.”

The next year, the community began installing photovoltaic panels to collect solar power. Today, it has 52 in place and two more on the way. It also started replacing older boilers with more efficient gas boilers, and utility bills went down immediately. “We estimate that we’re saving about $100,000,” Schaefer says.

There’s no getting around the extra capital investment required to go green. Old technology is almost always cheaper. But unlike many developers who complete a project and then flip it, developers of housing for older residents tend to hold on to their properties long enough to recoup their investments, even those that involve high-priced alternative power systems. Take for example NewBridge on the Charles, the latest project of Hebrew SeniorLife, which provides health care and housing in the Boston area. This eco-dazzler of a continuing care community in Dedham, Mass., draws its power from 408 geothermal wells, each up to 500 feet deep. The system cost a stunning $4 million. Repayment will take eight or nine years but after that, it’s money saved.

Green tech: not just for the wealthy

In some cases, nonprofit organizations that develop new housing for low-income Americans age 50 and older can better afford the latest and greenest technologies through special grants and tax credits. Berkeley, Calif.-based Satellite Housing is one such organization. In 2007, it opened the solar-powered Helios Corner, a mixed-use development that includes 80 rent-subsidized, independent-living apartments for older residents and also houses the company’s headquarters. A hydronic heat system—sort of a high-tech, superefficient radiant heat system—has kept winter heating bills at $10 or $15 a month per unit, significantly lower than the local average of $60 per unit. The company is also adding solar panels, dual-pane windows and efficient appliances to the 1970s-era structures it manages. Helios Corner also fits another aspect of Satellite’s green mission—developing housing in dense neighborhoods with easy access to services and public transportation, notes the organization’s executive director, Ryan Chao.

The next green wave

Indeed, where and how green communities are built is the next frontier. In-town living is gaining momentum. A building set in a dense area, close to shops, doctors and other services, is already halfway toward winning LEED certification as a green building. HPD Cambridge Inc. started developing in-town senior housing more than two decades ago. “For years we had been out in the cornfields, developing large multilevel care campuses,” says David Sanders of his St. Louis-based company. “We were getting more and more antsy, not just about the green aspect but about why we were taking people who were becoming less mobile and planting them in self-contained environments to live the rest of their lives so far away from their shops and beauty salons and communities. We decided there must be a better way.” Against the recommendation of many of their colleagues in the field, HPD Cambridge built an independent-living development two decades ago in the St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves. Today, the company is exploring wind turbines and other alternative energy sources.

Bucolic NewBridge on the Charles in Dedham, Mass., also isn’t a traditional continuing care community. For one thing, it shares its campus with an elementary school; and rather than a clear-cut, paved and intensely landscaped setting, NewBridge’s facilities consume just 62 acres of its 162-acre riverfront property, leaving the rest as intact forest and meadowland. Of the land that has been developed, most is landscaped with native plants; only 13 acres require irrigation. And those 13 irrigated acres will draw their water not from the adjacent Charles River but from rainwater collected in cisterns that can hold 170,000 gallons.

Lorraine Greenfield has driven a Prius hybrid for five years, recycles as much as she can and tries to conserve energy at her Milton, Mass., home. In June, she’ll move into a cottage at NewBridge. If you have a choice of where to live, she says, “why not help the environment?”

Siobhan Roth is a writer based in Washington, D.C.