Embedding sustainable practices within the audiovisual industry is a big and broad challenge. To stimulate the industry into more sustainable habits, a smart combination of initiatives is needed. There is no one magic solution for achieving this challenge: the way to go is a clever mix of raising awareness, measuring impact, motivating cast and crew, knowledge, funding, learning how to work more sustainably in different departments and much more.
When striving towards sustainability it is important to clearly define the concept “concept of sustainability”. Do you want to reduce energy and resource consumption? Or is the reduction of greenhouse gasses the aim? Or are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) your moral compass?
One of the tools that are commonly used is a carbon calculator. Such a tool maps the different fields of the impact of audiovisual production and translates topics like transport, electricity production and use, waste, catering, etc. into comparable units. In most cases, CO2 is used as a reference unit, but impacts like toxicity, land, water use and health are also relevant.
Eureca aims to have a rough reference assessment of your film , based on the financial budget and to detect the different important fields of impact. By reporting your actual impact, Eureca will generate an overview of the environmental savings. Eureca will also allow for the consolidation of broad results of different films at a regional level and will be linked to the Green Film certification scheme.
Eureca is based on scientific information on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and helps all kinds of audiovisual productions, covering pre-production, production and post-production to predict the important fields of impact during the planning phase, but also allows to report once the production is up and running.
Eureca
is not a magical solution: you will still need to make the decisions
based on your own experience, depending on the availability of
sustainable goods and services in your local market, building on the
craftsmanship and creativity of your team and within your budget
limitations. But it will at least offer you a better and more reliable
environmental assessment.