Labor Education Assistance Program - IATSE Local 8 Philadelphia

active Environment Committee, and with the help of a
start up grant from IATSE 891 and the Recycling Council
of British Columbia, has launched a Reuse-Recycling website
[www.reelreuse.com] that allows all [production]
departments to list materials for reuse,” Adair continues.
“The original concept was a storefront but the cost of
transporting, storing, operating
and cataloguing materials
morphed into an on line trading
platform.”
While Local 891 film crews
have embraced green practices
like car-pooling, rapid
transit, composting, and using
bio-diesel fuel to power generators
and vehicles, mid-level gatekeepers,
like Line Producers and
Unit Production Managers,
have been slow to buy in,
unless there is a clear
benefit to the bottom
line. Local 891 construction
coordinator Doug
Hardwick cites recent
shows he's worked on,
where he describes
recycling and reusing
efforts as being about 50
percent successful. “In
one example,” Hardwick
recounts, “we watched
Photo is from Eva Radke, USA829 scenic artist and Founder,
President of Film Biz Recycling (featured in article). This
image is all of props and set dressing that have been "rescued"
or donated from various film/TV/commercial productions
in lieu of being sent to a landfill.
more than 30 bins of usable materials being bulldozed
because the additional days of location rentals to allow
for deconstruction, reuse, segregation and recycling
were not budgeted. Corporate disposal policies can also
trump a reuse scenario when they require used assets to
fetch 50 cents on the dollar and the market only pays 10
cents.
Production veterans like Hardwick insist the best
model for greening up B.C. sets is for employers to hire
a sustainability officer with a dedicated budget and
authority, similar to safety programs used to administer
OSHA guidelines. “There has to be a real commitment
on the ground,” Hardwick concludes. “Eclipse
[Summit Entertainment’s The Twilight Saga] received
production materials from an MGM show as they
wrapped which was incorporated in to the sets. And
one of the [film’s] major landscape sets was a raised 75
x 120-foot platform designed to be hoisted and reconfigured
at different angles. This saved the labor and
material required for the construction of another set
and the time involved.”
LET NO THING
GO TO WASTE
USA 829 member Eva Radke began her career as an
art department coordinator in the New York commercial
industry, and she saw firsthand the volume of waste a
high-end TV spot would create. “It was my job to get rid
of everything,” Radke recalls, “so I would spend half my
wrap day on Craig’s List because I couldn’t bear to see
that ¾-inch piece of plexiglass go to waste!” Radke even
started an on-line list-serve to help other art department
members reuse materials.
“That convinced me that a full-time recycling business
could make this wonderful business that I love
even better,” she infuses. So the Austin, Texas native
took a full month off to test the waters, and soon had
more phone calls coming in than she could answer.
“The business has really turned into an environmental
mission that addresses the triple bottom line of profit,
people, planet,” adds Radke. “Every time a film, TV, or
commercial shoots in New York I want to save them
money, cut down on their eco-waste, and donate used
materials to those less fortunate.”
Film Biz Recycling ( www.filmbizrecycling.org),
based in Long Island City, is a non-profit entity that
allows New York producers to donate their production
materials and receive a tax write-off for the full amount
they paid for the items. Radke says that ninety-five percent
of the sets, props, and dressing donated to Film
Biz Recycling goes right back out to screened charities,
while the top five percent of items go back into a 2,600
foot re-sale prop house she calls “gorgeous because
everything in there has been selected by union decorators.
A few years ago it would have gone to a landfill,
but now is being bought or rented back for another
production.”
And the level of savings for producers has surprised
even Radke. A Dell Computer shoot valued
their donations at $15,000 and the (Universal Studios)
feature Duplicity, which donated more than
200 items, sent her an inventory valued at more
than $38,000. “As an art department coordinator I
saw the budgets coming in on these large commercials
we were doing and the average stage job spent
$10,000 in lumber, and more than $12,000 in purchases,”
she recounts. “It’s not unheard of for a film
to spend $1,000,000 in lumber and it can all end up
in a landfill.”
“Dematerialization” is a new industry model that
may well hold the key to the future of green production
practices. The workflow is aimed at eliminating a
“cradle-to-grave” approach where sets are built from
scratch and then trucked straight to the dumpster after
production. “It would be great to lessen the use of staples
and glues in set construction as much as possible,”
Radke continues. “If the materials are screwed together
and then deconstructed at the end of the show, they
can be reused or repurposed. And roughly 80 percent
of a typical production is compostable, with drop-off
places around New York where it only costs $20 per
bag. ”
Local 892 Costume Designer Kresta Lins, who was
moved to green action after attending a 2007 Oakland
convention sponsored by the California Labor Council,
is undertaking a similar mission on the West Coast. “One
of the sidebar meetings at that convention involved how
to create green jobs that are union,” Lins recounts. “So
when I got back I asked our Guild president if I could
write a green article and she was all for it. Doing
research opened my eyes about just how much of the
materials we use in the costume department never get
recycled!”
Inspired by the 2008 feature film The Dutchess,
Lins set about creating a visual template for IATSE
designers and costumers. “The scene where Ralph
Fiennes undresses Keira Knightly and you see the
cages that supported the dresses of that period
reminded me of the plastic laundry baskets we use
that never get recycled,” Lins smiles. “It snowballed
from there to create a dress made entirely of recyclable
materials, which we could put on a poster for
Local 892 and Local 705 members as a conversation
starter. The body of the dress is shopping and garments
bags, the panniers (dress cages) underneath
are the laundry baskets, and the ruffles are mostly old
script pages. I made the wig out of dry cleaning bags,
water bottles and wire hangers!”
When Lins queried Reel Green Media about green
printers for producing the posters of her creation, Lauren
Selman agreed to help create a six-dress campaign
that would focus on different areas of recycling within
the industry; thus the “Sustainable Sirens” project was
born. “Our next dress is the ‘E-Waste’ and it will be fitted
for a mermaid,” Lins continues. “The focus is on computers,
electronics, DVDs, monitors, printers, cell
phones, batteries and similar materials that should not
end up in a landfill. I’ve collected about three towers of
DVDs from the art department of Criminal Minds to
make the mermaid’s scales!”
Another outfit from the Sustainable Sirens will
focus on what many say is the film and television
industry’s biggest green challenge – catering and food
waste. “There is a lot of misinformation about composting
on sets,” Lins adds. “Biodegradable plastics,
like the corn and potato-based silverware Fox and
Warner Bros. are now using, cannot be thrown in with
other recyclable plastics; they need to be commercially
composted with both heat and oxygen in order to
properly break down. Also the City of L.A. does not yet
have a food-based composting program. These are just
two examples that are not common knowledge on Hollywood
sets.”
But that may soon change. Lins’ recyclable creation
was put on display at the Paramount Studios Green
House event for over a month, where it helped inform
visitors on sustainable efforts within the film industry.
Even Hollywood’s most energetic green evangelist says
the days of an on-set environmental position that is part
of the union crew may be more essential than ever. Selman
recently allowed herself to be filmed for a festival
documentary as she attempted to green the set of The
River Why, an independent feature shot on location in
Portland, Oregon,
“The producer [of The River Why] wanted to shoot a
green movie,’” she recalls. “But no one on the film really
knew what that meant and I encountered some confusion:
the producer can’t rent a hybrid when there’s
only one in all of Portland! Going green is like shifting a
battleship: it’s hard, it’s challenging, and it takes time.
And we need to have the above-the-line and below-theline
communities working together as one force to
make it happen.”
26 Official Bulletin Fourth Quarter 2009 27