The Mill shows our eco-warriors where to go...
Last week, we at AdGreen held our first Green Production Get Together. Born out of a need for fellow production staff to meet like minded people and get advice on how to make their own shoots greener, we partnered up with The Mill and held the inaugural event at their amazing 5th floor space on Windmill Street. Freelance production staff Jo, Daisy, Poppy and Eleri joined Frankie of Park Pictures, Rachel from Ogilvy and Kati from the APA to put on the event and share their first hand experience of going greener.
We structured the evening around Five Easy Things that everyone could do to make their shoot operate more sustainably: reducing printing, ditching polystyrene and correx (an unrecyclable plastic location protection material), reducing water bottles, rehoming leftovers and recycling or composting shoot waste.
Jo welcoming the crowd
Once the 100-strong crowd had grabbed a drink or two, Jo gave a short overview of how AdGreen came to be, followed by Daisy and Poppy's top notch accounts of how they've been embedding these five principles. Over the last few months they've been hiring water coolers, replacing correx with Ram Board (a recycled and recyclable location protection material), and displaying shoot documents on a noticeboard, instead of printing individual copies for all attendees. Daisy and Poppy, along with Jo, have been documenting these changes in our green production case studies - check them out here. We also invited some of our favourite suppliers down to The Mill to tell us how their products and services can help us with these green tips too: recycling and composting company Quantum Waste, Get Set Hire, Casting Networks, We Are Find and food redistribution charity City Harvest all took a turn on the mic.
Before we wrapped up, Rachel gave us a quick rundown of of how AdGreen has been working with Ogilvy over the last few months, helping them to put together some green production guidelines which will be shared with all production companies as each new job begins. "It's important that we collaborate on this issue rather than telling production companies what to do and taking none of the responsibility", said Rachel.
"I left AdGreen’s last event inspired. Sustainability initiatives are normally costly and bureaucratic but they got the right people into the room and succinctly presented us with new ways of approaching things that we do anyway - brilliant!"
Robin Beshoori, Connection Crew
Sticker central!
Our stickers, given out as people arrived, helped wannabe eco-warriors identify those who were seasoned green production specialists after the presentation had ended - talk of water coolers, composting and Ram Board continued right up until kicking out time.
We were thrilled with the turn out for the event, and it seems our wisdom was gratefully received. Robin Beshoori of Connection Crew emailed us afterwards: "I left AdGreen’s last event inspired. Sustainability initiatives are normally costly and bureaucratic but they got the right people into the room and succinctly presented us with new ways of approaching things that we do anyway - brilliant!" These small changes are building a Green Production community, with those trying the Five Easy Things being encouraged to share their experiences on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, using #greenproduction. As with anything, demand drives supply and helps to lower prices of these new materials and hire items. We've created a dedicated page for our Five Easy Things so if you're reading this and you have a shoot coming up, give them a go and let us know! And be sure to subscribe to the blog (at the bottom of the menu on the right) to be notified of future events.
