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More than retail or hotels, the film industry is destroying the planet. But sustainable sets like Oscar winner 'The Whale' may offer a new way forward.

Parisa Hashempour   

More than retail or hotels, the film industry is destroying the planet. But sustainable sets like Oscar winner 'The Whale' may offer a new way forward.

The film industry has a sustainability problem, and it's massive: The average tentpole production — a film with a budget over $70 million — generates 2,840 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the British Film Institute reported. About 3,709 acres of forest absorb that amount of CO2 in a year.

In 2015, the movie "Mad Max: Fury Road" infamously damaged Namibia's "fragile deserts," and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2000 film "The Beach" led tourists to spoil the movie's namesake location in Thailand.

With plastic water bottles littering sets, flights to shoot on location, and diesel generators powering lights and cameras, researchers have dubbed the entire movie business a major contributor to the climate crisis.

But on the set of films like the Oscar winner"The Whale," priorities are starting to shift.

Hauling in experts from Earth Angel, a sustainability agency that assists in reducing entertainment productions' negative environmental impact, creators of "The Whale" reduced plastic waste, repurposed food and set items, and contributed to local social projects.

Many production teams make little effort to report their resource consumption or to adapt to the critical needs of the climate despite the fact that the movie industry's greenhouse-gas record is larger than other big polluters such as the manufacturing, clothing, and hotel sectors. Films such as "The Whale" may demonstrate how first-rate filmmaking doesn't have to come at the cost of the planet and could offer a climate-conscious model for the industry.

There's some progress across sets

Earth Angel provided movies including "Black Panther," "The Underground Railroad," and series such as Apple TV's "Severance" with on-the-ground set workers who manage water and waste, monitor energy usage, collect food donations, and repurpose material waste. They also work with production teams to try to limit a production's overall emissions.

"The Whale" was recorded in a studio, which kept energy consumption and transportation low. This decision gave Earth Angel an opportunity to help create a movie with minimal environmental impact — in the average production, transportation accounts for around 51% of a film's carbon emissions, while electricity and gas usage takes up about 34%.

"We essentially did everything we could to keep materials out of landfill," Tamsin Hollo, an eco-coordinator who worked on the set of "The Whale," told Insider. Most of the days on set, Hollo was stationed beside a Zero Waste Station, which she said are "like normal trash stations but with compost and recycling."

Hollo spent her working days scouring cast-and-crew food tables for compostable scraps, ensuring plant-plastic compostable tableware ended up in the right bins, and educating actors, sound techs, and runners alike on the merits of recycling and composting materials.

Describing her role as "caretaking," Hollo said she faced initial resistance from cast and crew members, but as filming progressed, she noticed a clear shift in behavior. "It comes to the point where it's normal for someone to go home and think, 'Why don't I have a recycling bin?'"

In an email to Insider, an Earth Angel spokesperson said that, on the set of "The Whale," Earth Angel diverted 5.4 tons of material — more than the weight of two SUVs — from landfills and repurposed 2.1 tons of materials as donations. They also gifted over 1,800 meals to food banks and community organizations while filming.

While sets would throw away excess food in the past, Earth Angel works with local partners to help deliver it to those in need. Because food on set is often perishable, it can't be donated to traditional food banks. Local coordination is needed to send the food to the right places.

After wrapping a recent show in Atlanta, Quinn Yawger, an Earth Angel eco-supervisor who oversees day-to-day project management on set, delivered leftover wood, PVC pipes, metal pipes, lumber, and other valuable items to the local nonprofit makerspace Freeside Atlanta.

Yawger saw raw materials from industry waste transform into items such as tables, outdoor furniture, bowls, and benches. "It was special to see that second life and the positive impact it made on people, as well as how excited the crew got about it," she said.

While these solutions are a positive shift at the production level, they are small compared to the industry's overall carbon footprint. With massive incoming profits — and a lack of accountability around greenhouse-gas emissions — there's little incentive for studios and producers to change, Yawger said.

"It's about more people valuing the Earth and understanding the impact we're having on the world," she said. "Fifty years from now, it's not going to matter what the newest blockbuster is because we're all going to be in a place where we're not going to enjoy it in the way that we used to."

Shifting mindsets

The film-and-entertainment industry has known about its waste problem since at least 2006, when a landmark study from the University of California, Los Angeles put the industry under the spotlight and found that the California entertainment industry was responsible for 8.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Everybody has some sort of impact, everybody has waste, everybody uses fuel, everybody uses energy.

"It revealed the film industry was the second most polluting behind aerospace," Jennifer Sandoval, the director of service development at Earth Angel, told Insider. "It was ahead of hotels, ahead of retail."

Sandoval said that during this time, requests for sustainable-production services began to pick up.

While only some movies have sustainability workers as part of their crews, production companies and studios are beginning to realize their impact, Sandoval said.

Show-business heavyweights from across the board are adapting their sustainability goals to meet consumer expectations. The industry giant Netflix — which, in 2021, reported it had accumulated a carbon footprint of roughly 1.5 million metric tons — said it will cut its emissions in half by 2030. NBCUniversal pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2035. And in 2018, the world's first "climate-neutral" film, "Bosque de Niebla," was released in Mexico; rather than aiming for zero emissions, it purchased carbon offsets through a United Nations scheme allowing businesses to fund emission-reduction projects. The jury is still out on the merits of offsetting.

But it isn't always easy getting everyone on board.

The sustainable option often involves extra steps, such as putting trash in the correct bin or finishing a water bottle before grabbing another — or better yet, reusing it. This meant Sandoval's team often faced resistance on set, which she credits to the grueling 12-hour days that actors and crew typically work.

"The reality is, even with sustainability people on set, you need the whole crew involved because everybody has some sort of impact, everybody has waste, everybody uses fuel, everybody uses energy," she said.

Typically, energy presents one of the biggest challenges in curbing the future environmental damage of films. "Plastic and trash are very visible in the film industry, and people can understand why we need to change things," Yawger said. "But energy is a hidden form of waste."

This can make it hard to convince production companies to switch to sustainable solutions such as renewable-power generators, which can have higher initial start-up costs. "You don't see the return on investment right away," Sandoval said.

A more sustainable future

For the industry to curb its carbon footprint, it must incorporate sustainability at the beginning of production, Sandoval and Yawger said. "It all starts for us in pre-production, and assessing where we can help," Yawger added.

Developing effective energy strategies, building a circular economy — one that is sustainable from the very start of production right up until the audience views a film in theaters — in film, and eliminating all single-use plastics in movies will have the greatest impact, Sandoval said.

But it has to start in the writer's room, where sustainability-focused crew members can read a script and look for opportunities to insert new dialogue and make adjustments. These changes might help drive a more climate-conscious narrative or simply enable Earth Angel to swap out a character's plastic water bottle for a reusable one.

"From the very beginning, before they start building or buying their materials, is there a way we can design it to be more sustainable?" Sandoval said.

This, and climate storytelling — movies and shows that focus on the climate crisis itself — will have their own role to play.

"What is unique to film is its ability to influence," Sandoval said. "Normalizing sustainable behavior on-screen can actually have a massive influence on the general public."

"In the end, we are heading towards crisis and this industry, like every industry, has to be doing everything we can."

This article is part of "The Great Transition," a series covering the big changes across industries that are leading to a more sustainable future. For more climate-action news, visit Insider's One Planet hub.



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