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Posts Tagged ‘circular economy’

Hollywood’s Unsustainable Ways

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 10, 2025| 6 Comments »

Photo: Tracy Nguyen for NPR.
In general, Hollywood cares little for the “circular economy,” but this helicopter at Beachwood Services, originally used in Black Hawk Down, has been repurposed in Terminator 4, Suicide Squad and The A Team, among other movies and TV shows.

As I was working on a post in which actor Benedict Cumberbatch bemoaned the wastefulness of Hollywood, I ran across a contrary example. Apparently, some folks in that world care about the environment or maybe just see a buck to be made by repurposing sets.

A big part of Hollywood’s problem relates to being in a hurry and taking the easy way out.

First Cumberbatch at the Guardian.

Catherine Shoard writes, “Benedict Cumberbatch has called the Hollywood film industry ‘grossly wasteful,’ taking particular issue with its squandering of resources in the aid of set building, lighting – and bulking up physiques for blockbusters.

“ ‘It’s horrific eating beyond your appetite,’ Cumberbatch told Ruth Rogers on her food-focused podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4, adding that when he was shooting Marvel’s Doctor Strange, he would eat five meals a day. In addition, he would snack on boiled eggs, almonds and cheese, in order to try to ingest enough protein to transform his body.

“ ‘Going back to responsibility and resourcefulness and sustainability, it’s just like, “What am I doing? I could feed a family with the amount I’m eating,” ‘ Cumberbatch said.

“ ‘It’s a grossly wasteful industry,’ he continued. ‘Think about set builds that aren’t recycled, think about transport, think about food, think about housing, but also light and energy. The amount of wattage you need to create daylight and consistent light in a studio environment. It’s a lot of energy.’ “

So there’s that.

On the other hand, according to National Public Radio, “Beachwood Services, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, rents out sets and props for reuse that were originally built for its own productions.”

That spark of hope was reported by Chloe Veltman.

“For decades,” she says, “it was standard practice in Hollywood for art departments to build sets for movies and TV shows from scratch, and then break them down at the end of production and haul the pieces off to the landfill.

” ‘The dumpsters just line up at the end of the show,’ said veteran Hollywood art director Karen Steward of many productions she worked on, from the 1988 high school comedy Johnny Be Good, to the 2013 political action thriller Olympus Has Fallen. ‘And there’s no talking about it, because it’s time to get off the soundstage.’

“Steward is part of a group of like-minded Art Directors Guild members who have been pushing for more sustainable practices for years, along with other allies. At first, she said, it was hard at first to get much traction. ‘We’re all about not wasting time, and hurry up, and get it done, and time is money.’

“But Steward said things are becoming easier, as the industry is gradually coming to grips with its impact on human caused climate change. …

” ‘To find a true circular solution, a true zero waste idea, is what we’re working toward,’ she said.

“According to Earth Angel, an agency that helps productions in the U.S. and around the globe reduce their carbon footprints, the average TV show or movie in 2022 created about 240 tons of waste, with an estimated half of that amount coming from the disposal of props and sets.

” ‘There are definitely more innovative, efficient ways of working,’ said Earth Angel founder and CEO Emellie O’Brien. ‘

‘We often just don’t give people the space and the breathing room to uncover those solutions.’

“One such solution is to reuse old sets rather than always building new ones. Beachwood Services, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, rents out sets and props for reuse that were originally built for its own productions. Located in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, its warehouses are packed with scenic gems. …

“Art directors sometimes resist the idea of reusing old sets, because they want to realize their own creative vision. But Sondra Garcia, Beachwood’s director of scenic operations, said the service allows them to alter what they rent to suit their needs.

” We tell people, “You’re going to put your own spin on it. You’re going to paint it. You’re going to reconfigure it. And then it is your design,” ‘ said Garcia. ‘The most important thing to remember is to recycle stuff because it’s less wasteful, and producers like it because it saves money.’

“And when those sets get too old to rent out to big-budget productions, they often wind up at places like EcoSet. Productions pay for the Los Angeles-based company to haul away their unwanted sets, props and construction materials. Instead of going to landfills, those treasures are then donated to whoever wants them. …

“But these solutions to Hollywood’s chronic waste problem only go so far.

“Ecoset’s owners don’t know what happens to all of the free stuff the business gives out — whether it’s recycled again or thrown away. Also, many warehouses around the region that used to keep old sets and props in circulation have downsized — Sony’s Beachwood Services formerly had five warehouses and now there are two — or have shuttered in the past couple of years, owing to rising real estate costs. …

” ‘I don’t think anyone in our industry would shy away from really hard challenges or else we wouldn’t be in our industry,’ said Everything Everywhere All at Once producer and sustainability champion Jonathan Wang. ‘But I do think it’s tricky.’

“Wang said despite people’s best intentions, a lot of materials still get thrown out in the rush to meet hectic production deadlines — including on his own sets.

” ‘I think it’s important to just acknowledge that we’re all figuring it out,’ Wang said. ‘We’re trying to do it better.’ “

More at NPR, here, and at the Guardian, here. No firewalls, but both those outlets need our support.

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“Mining” Demolished Buildings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 15, 2022| 6 Comments »

In the interest of bringing you some of the latest ideas in sustainability, here is a story on reusing building materials, leasing instead of buying products, and other ideas to lighten the planet’s burden. And they are not just ideas.

Jessica Camille Aguirre reports at the New York Times, “When the Dutch National Bank moved into its Amsterdam headquarters in 1968, the new buildings were epic and stylish. A sprawling Modernist landmark that took up an entire city block off the banks of the Amstel Canal, it was distinguished by a towering high-rise of polished ochre tile. …

“A few decades into the new millennium, the entire complex began to show signs of wear. Tiles fell off the facade. Pipes began to leak. And, perhaps most troubling in a country that prized itself on environmental innovation, its overextended heating systems burned too much fuel.

“In 2020, an architecture firm completed a design plan that would update the original structures and transform the inner courtyard into a public garden. …

“Typically, the fate of a building that has outlasted its usefulness is demolition, leaving behind a huge pile of waste. The Netherlands and other European countries have tried to reduce that waste with regulations. Buildings there are often smashed to pieces and repurposed for asphalt. … A Dutch environmental engineer named Michel Baars thought he could do better than turn [a building] into material for a road.

Mr. Baars considers himself an urban miner, someone who extracts raw materials from discarded infrastructure and finds a market for them. …

“Lean and no-nonsense, Mr. Baars belongs to an emerging group of architects, engineers, contractors and designers who are determined to find a new way to build. This group shares a philosophy rooted in a set of ideas sometimes called the circular or regenerative economy, the cradle-to-cradle approach, or the doughnut economy.

“There are two main tenets to their thinking: First, on a planet with limited resources and a rapidly warming climate, it’s crazy to throw stuff away; second, products should be designed with reuse in mind. The first idea is a recognizable part of our everyday lives: Recycling has retrieved value from household trash for a long time. More recently, the approach has started to gain a toehold in industries like fashion, with secondhand retailers and clothing rental services, and in food production, with compostable packaging. The second takes more forethought and would require companies to rethink their businesses in the most basic ways. Translating either concept to the infrastructure of human settlements requires considering reuse in much longer time scales. …

“Buildings use a prodigious amount of raw materials and are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the world’s climate emissions, half of which is generated by their construction. The production of cement is alone responsible for eight percent of global emissions.

“In recent years, concern about waste and the climate has led cities like Portland, Ore., and Milwaukee to pass ordinances requiring certain houses to be deconstructed rather than demolished. Private companies in Japan have spearheaded new ways of taking high-rises down from the inside, floor by floor. China promised to repurpose 60 percent of construction waste in its recent five-year plan. But perhaps no country has committed itself as deeply to circular policies as the Netherlands.

“In 2016, the national government announced that it would have a waste-free economy by 2050. At the same time, the country held the rotating Council of the European Union presidency, and it made circularity one of the main concepts driving the industrial sector across the bloc. Amsterdam’s city government has set its own goals, announcing plans to start building a fifth of new housing with wood or bio-based material by 2025 and halve the use of raw materials by 2030. Cities like Brussels, Copenhagen and Barcelona, Spain, have followed suit.

“Even in the Netherlands, though, creating a truly circular economy is challenging. Nearly half of all waste in the country comes from construction and demolition, according to national statistics, and a stunning 97 percent of that waste was classified as ‘recovered’ in 2018. But most of the recovered waste is downcycled — that is, crushed into roads or incinerated to produce energy. A 2020 report by the European Environment Agency pointed out that only 3 to 4 percent of material in new Dutch construction was reused in its original form, which means that trees are still being cut for lumber and limestone still mined for cement. …

“Mr. Baars, who runs a circular demolition company called New Horizon, sent a crew of around 15 people to take down the office partitions [in the bank tower]. They packed off interior glass and plasterboard to companies that could make use of the materials. Then, starting at the top of the 86,000-square-foot tower, they began removing the glass facade. A crane lifted pieces to a quay, where they were loaded onto barges in the Amstel Canal for the seven-mile trip upriver to Mr. Baars’s warehouse.”

A 2012 McKinsey report presented at the Davos World Economic Forum suggested that companies were missing out on opportunities to create new business models. “What if, for example, manufacturers could make more money by leasing, rather than selling, their products?

“Thomas Rau, an architect in Amsterdam, is a leading proponent of this idea. In 2015, he appeared in a Dutch documentary called The End of Ownership, in which he didn’t argue for abolishing ownership so much as for shifting it from individuals to manufacturers.

“If manufacturers retain ownership of their products, he argued, they will want to make products that last longer and need fewer repairs. Just as significant, they will want to design stuff that can be easily taken apart and used again. Theoretically, this could help consumers, too. No one wants to own a computer or television or washing machine, Mr. Rau claimed; they just want the services those products offer: computing ability, visual entertainment, textile cleaning. … Think about the speed with which subscription music-streaming services replaced ownership of CDs.” More at the Times, here.

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