In New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, there are many new environmentally friendly buildings. (Photo by Alessia Pirolo/CNS)

On a sunny spring afternoon, stylish mommies walked in and out of their downtown Manhattan apartments. One young woman pushed a stroller on which she had hung a “This is not a plastic bag” bag, even though she also carried several plastic bags from the grocery store. Another mother was loading her parents’ car with her and her children’s bags — and while she took credit for not driving, her father was waiting with the engine of his SUV running for half an hour.

Their preoccupation with environmental concerns is not surprising, considering that the women live close to Battery Park City, in Tribeca, in new, environmentally conscious buildings with names like the Solaire, Tribeca Green and the Verdesian. One almost finished building advertises its luxury green rentals with the slogan “You are where you live.” Still, trying to respect the environment takes a lot of effort, and no one seems to be perfect.

But a recent study questions the motivation behind being green, which seems to not always be an altruistic decision. “Going Green to Be Seen,” by Vladas Griskevicius, of the University of Minnesota; Joshua M. Tybur, of the University of New Mexico; and Bram Van den Bergh of the Rotterdam School of Management asserts that people often choose green products mainly to improve their status.

One of the Tribeca green buildings’ managers, who preferred to remain anonymous, says the residents generally recycle and care about the area. But he questions their overall awareness. “They don’t know what it is, but they just like to say that they live in a green building,” he says. One of the Tribeca mothers, Ruth Klamm, a German teacher, said that for her, recycling is the rule but admits that she could pay more attention to turning off the lights. Others confess that they could take shorter showers or avoid wasting paper.

They were all proud of their certified efficient apartments, though. All these buildings have received either the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) or Energy Star certification. The U.S. Green Building Council is a nonprofit trade organization that provides a set of standards for the environmentally sustainable design, construction and operation of buildings and neighborhoods, and there are currently 4,825 LEED-certified projects, with an additional 24,290 registered, the first step to being certified under the LEED rating system. Energy Star is an internationally and governmentally recognized program that aims to reduce homes’ greenhouse gas emissions, and more than 1 million homes have been built with this certification in the U.S. since the program began in 1995.

Don Gochenour and Kelly Sanders live in a green building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Photo by Alessia Pirolo/CNS)

Judie Anning, a former television producer, now a full-time mom, lives at Tribeca Green, a 25-floor building that has both LEED and Energy Star labels. She had several reasons to move there, including her desire to avoid chemical exposure for her child and the building’s rule about using only low VOC (volatile organic compounds) paints. She says that living in an environmentally responsible way in one of these buildings “is very easy.” Also, “It’s kind of trendy. A lot of movie stars do it,” she says.

Magazines and tabloids are full of celebrity examples. Back in 2005, the actor Johnny Depp converted his Bahamas home to run on solar-hydrogen technology. Depp’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” co-star Orlando Bloom imitated him, building an environmentally friendly house in London. Ed Begley Jr., known for his roles in several of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries and as Dr. Victor Ehrlich on the television series “St. Elsewhere,” has created a new environmentalist career producing a “green” reality show, “Living With Ed.”

“Green purchases are often motivated by status,” says Griskevicius, one of the authors of the “Going Green to Be Seen” study. “People want to be seen as being altruistic,” he says, but this desire does not mean that they are actually selfless. “Nothing communicates that better than by buying green products that often cost more and are of lower quality but benefit the environment for everyone.” The study subjects were asked to choose between green and nongreen products both in public and in private. The results showed that people tend to pick up green products more often when they expect to be seen. Griskevicius says the concern with status extends to the choice of where to live. “What if you moved in a green building and you couldn’t tell anyone else?” he says. Even for a residence, “the display part is very important.”

Megan Bhatia is the owner of Chicago’s Om Realty Group, a brokerage company that helps in buying and selling properties and focuses on how to make them greener and sustainable. Chicago ranks first in the U.S. for LEED-certified buildings. Still, Bhatia does not think people are aware enough. “Often people just don’t ask the right questions. They buy homes for how pretty they are,” without checking how much energy they consume. She is critical of green labels. “The LEED brand is a sort of status symbol,” she says. “It is a very good program, but it costs a lot.” She explains that only developers of big buildings can afford to meet all the requirements but asserts that results can be obtained on an individual basis with a little effort through improvements like changing window glass and using energy-saving lightbulbs.

Not all green dwellers care about being part of a trend, though. “Probably this is true in Tribeca. Here is different,” says Don Gochenour, a software engineer who lives with his wife, Kelly Sanders, a clothing designer, in a building called Greenbelt, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y. The couple had spent a couple of years in San Francisco and were used to green standards, because California is the state with the most LEED-certified buildings, 720. (Texas is second, with 255, and New York is fifth, with 228.)

With their budget, Gochenour and Sanders, who have a 5-year-old daughter, had the choice of a large apartment with a beautiful view or a smaller one built with recycled materials, solar panels on the roof and a rule prohibiting the use of any chemicals. They happily chose the latter. Their reason? “It’s the right thing to do.” They recycle religiously, try to avoid waste and want to start composting.

And some environmentalists believe that the greenest solution is to avoid new construction, certified or not. Cherlyn Seruto — a sustainable-design consultant at Rocky Mountain Institute, a research institute focused on the sustainable use of energy, in Snowmass, Colo. — never thought to look for a new green building but worked instead on her own 1890s Victorian house, recently converted into a duplex. She changed windows and used recycled materials to reach the goal of creating a zero emissions house.

“Green developers often are just attracted by an expanding market,” she says. “The best solution is to try to not build at all, to try to live in smaller apartments, to reduce our impact.”