Editor's Letter: Green initiatives
Issue: May 1, 2012

Editor's Letter: Green initiatives

This is the fourth year Post has tackled the topic of “greening the industry.” Previously, we’ve spoken to big-time movie studios, big-time producer Lesley Chilcott (An Inconvenient Truth), and a handful of individuals who were making a difference on movie/television sets. This year, I am very happy to say we spoke to post studios only. There are now a good amount of post houses that have picked up the mantle.

Matt Peterson runs the Website Veratique (http://vertatique.com), which focuses on greening tips and research regarding the post, broadcast and IT industries. He says, “Our analysis of national and global corporate sustainability rankings show that IT and communications companies typically outnumber media companies five to one in the top tiers. This is now changing, meaning more pressure is on media service operations to adopt sustainability specific to production and post workflows. Over 30 percent of facilities tell us that they already have such sustainability programs. These include requirements for hardware vendors, primarily focused on energy consumption and hazardous waste reduction.”

He says the easiest way for a post house to start is to “look at your workflow and identify where the energy consumption is, because that drives your carbon emissions, and a lot of other issues.”

Greg Milneck of Digital FX, one of the people we spoke to for this issue, is working his way to Gold LEED certification. And on page 20, he walks us through a lot of what his studio in Baton Rouge has done to achieve this standard. These are things that go beyond gear and plastic bottles. “We were looking into a cistern system, but budget and practicality wouldn’t allow. With it you maintain all that water and use it in your building internally — you have pumps or a natural draining system using water accumulated from rainfalls. I do that at my house with wine barrels placed under the gutters. It has a drain at the bottom and we use it to feed our vegetable garden.”