This month, the Producers Guild of America released the Green Production Guide, a website and resource to help make film production a little more sustainable. The guide includes tips for recycling props and other materials used on-site, an extensive list of vendors and companies offering green products and services, a carbon calculator, and many more resources for tracking and improving the use of energy and materials in producing films, TV shows, and new media projects.

From the website:

“With seed funding and support provided by Disney, Fox, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros., the PGA, as part of its PGA Green Initiative, has developed this tool for the production and entertainment community to further its goal of integrating sustainable practices into its operations and reducing the environmental footprint within the production process.”

Fun fact: past carbon-neutral productions include “Syriana”, “An Inconvenient Truth”, “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Sweet Land”. To be considered a carbon-neutral production, producers must calculate their total carbon footprint (all energy expended–transportation of actors and crew, electricity used on set, materials/labor to make props and costuming, etc.) and then offset that total footprint by doing things like planting trees and investing in clean energy.