BAFTA has a free online carbon calculator for TV and film productions, small or mega.
For some reason it’s called Albert.(?!)
It was developed by the BBC, putting our tv license money to good use, to make tv production greener. Using it, the BBC has found that producing one hour of tv creates about 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The Women’s Film & TV Network points out,
“To put the BBC’s figures into context: 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide is enough to fill almost 50 double decker buses, it weighs the same as two adult elephants or 1, 800 cats and it’s close to the footprint you would expect from eight ‘typical’ UK citizens over one year.”
Clearly, this amount has to come down. BAFTA’s holding a free Greening the Screen event in London on 12 November to discuss how this can happen.
Ways of reducing the carbon emissions from tv & film production include:
- building sets from pre-used materials
- using renewable energy (solar, used vegetable oil or wind) generators
- sleep in hotels with sound environmental policies
- ask your crew to travel together,
- reduce and recycle waste
- as the BBC Comedy production Mongrels did, use low energy lighting. This cut their electricity bill by over 40%.
There is a new code of practice for greener film and tv production, British Standard 8909, which indicates what to do to reduce a production’s carbon footprint.
Links to carbon calculators for other lines of work, as well as schools and households, are here.