As landfills begin to overflow across the United States, one unlikely industry is taking steps to reduce its impact: Hollywood.
NPR reported that the industry's art departments — those people who design creative sets for film and television — are moving toward a more circular model instead of throwing everything away at the end of productions.
Hollywood set waste may not be at the top of the list in most people's minds when it comes to trash. But NPR reported that according to Earth Angel, an agency that helps productions across the world reduce their climate impacts, the average TV show or movie in 2022 generated around 240 tons of waste — about half of that came from props and sets.
This is problematic, as landfills across the country are running out of space. But it's not just that — these giant heaps of garbage are threatening our health and that of the planet.
According to the University of Colorado at Boulder, the most pressing concern when it comes to landfills is the amount of methane they produce — methane is a powerful planet-heating gas that is released from the organic matter in landfills as it decomposes.
Plus, landfills often destroy natural habitats for animals, while toxic chemical runoff from these sites can contaminate nearby water sources, the university says.
Art director Karen Steward is one of the people leading the charge to make Hollywood sets more sustainable. She helped found the Art Directors Guild's Green Committee, which shares best practices and educates about reducing waste and sourcing more sustainable set construction materials. She said that the concept of greening up sets was a hard sell at first but that things are getting easier.
"To find a true circular solution, a true zero waste idea, is what we're working toward," Steward told NPR.
One of the solutions employed by some productions is reusing sets instead of constantly building new ones. For instance, Beachwood Services, part of Sony Pictures Entertainment, rents out sets and props that were originally built for its own productions. When those get too old to rent out, the items are sometimes donated to groups like EcoSet, which takes a production's unwanted sets, props, and construction materials and donates them to whoever wants them.
However, even amid these changes, many things still get thrown out, producer and sustainability champion Jonathan Wang told NPR. To help fix this, producers should aim to reduce their environmental impact similar to the way they dealt with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said — during this time, many art departments were devoting around 5% of their budgets to things like health and safety officers and testing.
"We are currently in an emergency, burning through resources faster than we renew them," Wang told the publication. "We need to view this as an emergency and set aside a percentage of our budgets for innovation towards sustainability."
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