Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »
Do we have to pay a high environmental price to feed our love of music and movies? DAVIN O'DWYERreports on the tricky trade-offs being made between the entertainment industry and the planet
LIGHTS, camera, action - a catchphrase that has long captured the magic of film-making, evoking the technical wizardry that brings cinema to life. But increasingly, it also points to cinema's under-discussed environmental problem - all those lights are usually tungsten incandescent lights, those cameras often contain vast amounts of film requiring harmful chemicals to process, and all that action, especially of the explosive, Michael Bay-variety, doesn't come without emitting a few tonnes of greenhouse gasses. In short, for all its loudly proclaimed liberal idealism and environmental awareness, Hollywood has a carbon footprint problem - a sizeable feature film production will have a footprint of King Kong proportions, emitting about 450 tonnes of CO2 and up to 10,000 tonnes of construction waste for features with particularly large sets. And that's before you consider the director and stars jetting around the world for press-the-flesh publicity, or all those prints that get produced for what are ever shorter release periods.
