How to reduce carbon in advertising production

We need to do more as an industry if we are to achieve the industry target of reaching Net Zero by 2030. We recently attended AdGreen’s masterclass on sustainable production and here are our learnings from the session.

Why we need to do more

Carbon dioxide is the highest it’s been in the last 2 million years and the Arctic sea ice area is at its lowest. We are also close to exceeding 1.5°C global warming (currently at 1.1°C), anything higher than 1.5°C has the potential to cause irreversible damage to the world’s ecosystems. This has increased by 25% in the last 10 years.

Where we can start to reduce our carbon footprint in production

Firstly, you can calculate your carbon footprint for the advertising production here

1. Start on the areas that you can directly control such as the script, location, travel, catering etc.
2. Then focus on your team, are your team involved and willing to help reduce the carbon footprint of the project? Try to also work with sustainable suppliers, for example, catering companies that use real cutlery to minimise waste.
3. Finally, the emissions that you absolutely cannot avoid can be offset through natural capital partnerships or investing in global carbon reducing projects. This can be done through organisations like Cool Effects, or through AdGreen’s Creative Offsets scheme.

Tips

A lot of changes depend on what is feasible for your project. But these tips will most likely save you money as well. Here are a few places to start:

• Avoid meat on set as much as possible, this could be achieved by having an opt-in option for meat so that veggie options are the default.
• Go paperless on set.
• Use LED lighting on set.
• Potentially using CGI instead of a set build or travelling abroad, however this depends on the length of the post house, a longer time in post house will create more emissions from the energy used from computers.
• If a studio is needed, use ones powered by renewable energy, Albert have a list of studios that provide this as well as other sustainable suppliers.
• Use local crew and make sure only people that need to be there are there.
• Anything that can be done on video call should be.
• Use public transport when travelling to and from shoots.
• Shoot locations should be as close as possible, if flights are needed then economy class should be used instead of business class flights as this spreads the amount of carbon emissions across more people, economy class also uses less food and materials on flights such as disposable food and drink containers.
• Working with companies to recycle waste after shoots such as Quantum Waste. AdGreen also have a list of companies that will help re-home your leftover waste from shoots.
• Do you have any old sets you can repurpose?

We look forward to using these learnings and tips on our future shoots! Thank you AdGreen for the informative and interactive training session.

If you would like to learn more about how you can reduce the carbon footprint in your advertising production, look at AdGreen’s extensive resource guide on the AdGreen website. And speak to us at distillery!