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Eco-trendy Hollywood stars as major polluter

By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 2:30am BST 02/10/2007


From A-list actors driving hybrid cars to red carpets made from recycled plastic bottles, Hollywood is doing its utmost to flaunt its green credentials.

This year's Emmy awards featured a recycled red carpet
This year's Emmy awards featured a recycled red carpet

But the entertainment industry remains one of the biggest polluters in southern California, campaigners say, with many of its eco-friendly gestures simply showy stunts that make little difference.

Producing films and television programmes remains an incredibly energy intensive business, requiring massive amounts of power to operate vast lighting rigs, run air conditioning systems and cameras, and feed huge casts and crews around the clock.

Then there is the disposable nature of the industry - the intricate sets built from scratch, such as the airport created just for Steven Spielberg's 2004 film The Terminal, which use up tons of wood, metal, plastic and paint and are often discarded when production ends.

A two-year study released last year by the University of California at Los Angeles concluded that special effects explosions, idling vehicles and diesel generators make the film and television production second only to the oil industry in terms of polluting emissions.

Yet studio executives insist changes are being made in response to growing public awareness about climate change.

On Fox's popular drama series 24, the on-set generators now run on a mixture of fuel that is part biodiesel, although at the moment it is only five per cent.
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The giant facility where Warner Bros builds sets is being converted to solar energy and the company has begun recycling sets while News Corp, which owns Fox, has set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2010.

At this year's Primetime Emmy Awards, much noise was made about the recycled red carpet (which was later donated to schools) and the show was trumpeted as the first "carbon neutral" Emmys.

Tickets were "printed on tree-free paper, made of banana leaves" and even the goodie bags given to guests went green, with organisers pledging to "disperse all swag in reusable, canvas bags".

"No doubt some efforts have been window dressing. But I actually think Hollywood is doing far more than people are giving it credit for," said Terry Tamminen, a former adviser to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and environmental consultant.

One popular method involves buying carbon credits to offset the greenhouse gases released during production.

The 2004 Fox film The Day After Tomorrow and Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth offset all or some of their pollution.

The recent comedy Evan Almighty funded the planting of 2,000 trees to "zero out" its greenhouse gas production.

But the practice has come under fire by some who say it is an easy way to avoid the hard work of directly reducing pollution.

Others question whether carbon credit payments are actually going to projects that make that much of a difference.

The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, is examining claims made by the carbon credit industry.

"If you're going to drive around in a big ol' Hummer and then buy carbon offsets to mitigate that, that's like getting drunk on the weekends and throwing some money through the window of an AA meeting and thinking you're doing something," said Ed Begley Jr, the actor and veteran environmental campaigner.