Economic headwinds and uncertainties in B.C.’s film and TV industry are not making it harder for productions to be sustainable, but they could be causing distractions.
“They provide a lot of noise…opportunity for confusion,” said Zena Harris, president of the Green Spark Group.
Founded in 2014, the Vancouver-based sustainability consulting firm provides training for organizations in the film and television industry to enable sustainable production.
In the last decade, Harris said there’s been tremendous growth in sustainability awareness from industry organizations and productions in B.C. Nevertheless, the sector has encountered headwinds in recent times, like the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hollywood strikes in 2023, and now, the threat of 100 per cent tariffs on foreign-made films by U.S. President Donald Trump.
So far, these challenges haven’t affected the sustainability journey of Big Time Decent Productions Inc., said president and executive producer Matthew Shewchuk.
“It’s business as usual for us,” he said, highlighting that the Canadian Media Fund requires productions to provide carbon footprint reports on how the production is implementing sustainable practices.
He said the industry headwinds are dealt with separately, and in the meantime, the business must operate with a commitment to sustainability.
However, Shewchuk also said that headwinds are generating more issues to process and deal with, which could cause some bigger companies to reduce their sustainable practices.
Fuel consumption from transportation and equipment is a key factor in a production’s carbon footprint, said Harris. Additionally, there still isn’t a good measurement of the carbon in set materials, including things like wood in a production’s construction department, she said.
Data shows the annual carbon footprint of a feature film in Canada is around 7,126 tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the annual energy use of 1,669 homes, according to a 2023 industry carbon footprint report produced by Green Spark and commissioned by Telefilm Canada.
The footprint for a television series was significantly higher, coming in at about 260,843 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to the usage of 61,087 homes in a year. The report also showed the biggest carbon emitters in B.C. were travel and transport, responsible for 63 per cent of hourly emissions.
One of the main barriers for productions to be sustainable is widespread crew adoption, said Harris, and “going from show to show in a consistent manner and integrating sustainable practices.”
These are psychological and behavioural barriers, she said. Productions have the technology to reduce emissions and the means to calculate it, but staff need to feel confident and supported in that effort before utilizing equipment like electrical generators or carbon calculators, added Harris.
In late April, Green Spark announced they would enter a partnership with the Green Toolkit, a German carbon calculator software tool based on ISO 14067. This is an international standard for quantifying carbon footprints.
Green Spark decided to partner with the Green Toolkit to standardize their carbon accounting, to have that footprint audited by a third party and be ISO-certified, said Harris.
The industry’s sustainability trend really picked up around five years ago, when domestic producers, and most of the major film studios like Netflix Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., began implementing sustainability teams into their operations.
That’s what B.C. film commissioner Marnie Gee told BIV in February, who also said there’s been a shift in B.C. studios having very early conversations around sustainability, as opposed to midway or by the end of production.
Initiatives like Reel Green, from the BC Film Commission at Creative BC, are putting together industry partners to drive the adoption of these sustainable practices in the province’s industry.
Started in 2006, the initiative provides sustainable production training for crews and tools on how to reduce their footprint, and despite conversations around the future role of hydrogen power in the industry, for now, Gee said Reel Green is focusing on tying into B.C.’s clean power.
Out of the 22 productions who participated in the Green Spark study between spring 2022 and 2023, six of these were located in British Columbia. On average, B.C. had the second-lowest average emissions of other provinces at 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hour, just over the Prairies and Territories region at 7.2 tonnes.
Vancouver production companies embrace sustainability
When talking about sustainability, there could be misconceptions around the cost of undertaking green practices, and for Harris, the perceived cost of sustainability is a hindrance, whereas the actual cost tends not to be.
“When you start looking at the budget holistically, it is less expensive to incorporate sustainable practices,” she said.
Vancouver-based production company Thunderbird Entertainment Group Inc. (TSXV:TBRD), who’s sustainability journey started around two years ago, reduces emissions through logistics in pre-production and even before that, said vice-president of sustainability and business affairs Marsha Newbery in February.
This is the stage where you can have the most impact on your footprint, and taking these steps during production is already too late, she said.
An example of this is using electric generators and setting up filming locations relatively close together to reduce travel distances, which saved over $100,000 in fuel costs during the filming of Reginald the Vampire Season 2, according to Newbery.
“This is becoming a part of our legal and contractual requirements,” she said. “Five years ago, people didn't want to talk about it, and now, everybody wants to talk about it.”
Other Vancouver production companies like Big Time Decent offset carbon footprints on flights and hire locally to reduce impacts, said Shewchuk.
However, B.C.'s remoteness and the availability of electrical infrastructure is sometimes a challenge for both of these production companies, as the availability of green infrastructure is not uniform across the province, said Newbery.
Despite these challenges, the influx of U.S. studios with green policies that come to B.C. is driving growth in infrastructure, giving the province advantages that don’t exist elsewhere, she said.
