Proposed reading from Tara Cinani

Saving energy, cutting waste and recycling on the set help lower the movie’s carbon footprint and raise the bar for ‘green filmmaking.’

The star-studded cast of “Valentine’s Day” includes Patrick Dempsey and Jennifer Garner. Producers said only one of the film’s stars had to be asked to not show up on the set in a limousine (they wouldn’t say who). Others used rented hybrids. (Ron Batzdorff, Associated Press / September 10, 2009)

The star-studded romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day” is expected to generate plenty of green at the box office this weekend.

But it’s green of a different kind that could set “Valentine’s Day” apart in Hollywood.

The Warner Bros. movie, directed by Garry Marshall and featuring a raft of stars including Julia Roberts, Patrick Dempsey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Biel, took “green filmmaking” to a new level, according to people involved in the project.

The film — which follows the interwoven lives of a group of characters coping with romance and heartache over a single Valentine’s Day — was shot entirely in Los Angeles and features such landmarks as the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Los Angeles International Airport and University High School.

Most notable, however, were the lengths to which producers went to reduce their carbon footprint through extensive use of solar-powered and biodiesel generators, reusable water bottles, hybrid vehicles and composting of food waste, among other steps. Warner Bros. is even creating a video documenting the practices in the hopes that it will spur green standards for future productions.

“There’s no doubt that, with the exception ofsolarpanels, these practices can be implemented on a majority of our films,” said Jon Romano, sustainable production manager for Warner Bros. Pictures.

Warner Bros. says it’s impractical to expect each of the green practices used on “Valentine’s Day” to apply to all productions, given that solar power isn’t always feasible nor composting available at every location. But, Romano said, “It’s certainly going to be a model.”

Hollywood, of course, has a long way to go before it can tout its environmental record. The industry’s routine use of use carbon-belching private jets to ferry stars, for example, doesn’t comport with a green mandate.

Still, some producers are paying more than lip service to the hype, prompting equipment suppliers, vendors and film crews to change how they operate. Most studios have taken steps to reduce energy costs and some, such as Warner Bros., have hired environmental managers who work with productions to help identify and carry out sustainable practices.

“There has been a dramatic increase over the past five years in terms of film, TV and commercial projects incorporating sustainable practices,” said Lauren Selman, founder of Reel Green Media, a firm that advises filmmakers on green production practices. “A lot of people are sharing information right now. It’s a hot topic.”

Part of what’s driving the change is awareness about the effects of global warming, highlighted in such films as Al Gore’s 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and sensationalized in such blockbusters as 2004′s “The Day After Tomorrow.”

“It’s not just for PR,” said producer Marshall Herskovitz, president of the Producers Guild of America, which has hosted forums on green production and has been working with studios to develop sustainable standards. “There are a lot of people committed at every level of this industry who feel that the government has not taken the lead it should, and we have to do it ourselves.”

There are also business reasons for jumping on the green bandwagon. Studios and producers can save money by adopting basic habits, such as eliminating plastic water bottles.

In “Valentine’s Day,” producers used 350 reusable water bottles, eliminating 21,000 plastic bottles and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 67 metric tons, according to a “carbon audit” by Warner Bros.

Other steps included using solar-powered generators at the production camp, saving an estimated 19 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Rental trucks and set lighting generators were powered by biodiesel fuel. Caterers used biodegradable plates, cups and utensils to serve cast and crew meals during the 55-day shoot. Most of the 25 tons of waste collected through the filming was either composted or recycled.

And stars were supplied with hybrid rental cars to travel to the set. Only one star had to be asked to not show up in a limo, according to the film’s producers, declining to identify the actor.

“We had a pretty hip group of actors,” said Diana Pokorny, the film’s executive producer.

With the exception of solar panels, which proved more costly than conventional generators, the sustainable practices did not add to the cost of the film, executives said. The studio declined to disclose the film’s budget, but sources say it is less than $50 million.

Each department was encouraged to come up with ways to cut waste, such as reducing excess film or composting coffee grounds.

“Warner Bros. really wanted to see our film as changing the culture,” Pokorny added. “We tried to push what we can do and what we can do better next time.”

richard.verrier @latimes.com

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A POPULAR children’s song has a refrain — “the more we get together the happier we’ll be” — that may sound like a simplistic formula for solving the complex challenges of climate change and sustainability. But if any area is ripe for sharing and collaboration among organizations, it’s green innovation.

“We all want to save the planet, and the problems are bigger than any one firm, sector or country,” says Dr. Sarah Slaughter, coordinator of the M.I.T. Sloan Sustainability Initiative. In that spirit, several major corporations have taken inspiration from the open-source software movement and are experimenting with forums for sharing environmentally friendly innovations and building communities around them. The first such effort, the Eco-Patent Commons, was started in January 2008 by I.B.M., Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony in collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

The concept is straightforward: Companies pledge environmental patents to the commons, and anyone can use them — free.

Many patented environmental technologies are not strategic, so sharing maximizes the social benefit without sacrificing competitive advantage, says Wayne Balta, vice president of corporate environmental affairs and product safety at I.B.M. For instance, I.B.M. contributed a recyclable cardboard packaging insert that requires less fossil fuel to create and transport than the foam inserts that are now commonly used.

Other examples include a DuPont method for better detecting pollution in soil, air or water by using a microorganism that produces light when exposed to a pollutant. There are also methods from Xerox for removing toxic waste from contaminated groundwater, as well as a cleaning technique for semiconductor wafers from I.B.M. that uses ozone gas and eliminates chemical contaminants that result from other processes.

By assembling these patents in one easily accessible location — anyone can search through them on the council’s Web site — the hope is to encourage their widespread adoption, particularly in the developing world. Since its start, the commons has grown to 100 patents from 31, with 11 companies now participating.

Although there are no formal mechanisms for tracking who has used the commons, participating companies are sometimes contacted by users. For instance, Mr. Balta said that Yale had put into effect an I.B.M. method for decreasing the use of hazardous solvents in its quantum computing device research.

The Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that previously developed licensing programs to help in sharing creative and scientific content, is also planning to branch out into the environmental arena.

In collaboration with Nike and Best Buy, it plans to start a sharing initiative, the Green Xchange, in early 2010. The program will include both patented technologies and forums for continuing exchange of innovations such as Best Buy’s system for rating the sustainability of a supply chain. Companies that contribute patents to the Green Xchange will have the option of charging users a fixed annual licensing fee and can also restrict any licensing by rivals or for competitive use. In addition, even if no annual fee is charged, patent users must register so there is a record of who is using what technology.

Though more complex than that of Eco-Patent Commons, the structure of Green Xchange will yield greater numbers of high-quality inventions, says John Wilbanks, GreenXchange coordinator and vice president for science at Creative Commons.

“We don’t depend on altruism,” Mr. Wilbanks says. “This system helps the environment while enabling a firm to make money from patents in applications outside its core business.”

For instance, Nike’s air-bag patent for cushioning shoes is crucial to its core shoe business, but may have environmental benefits in other industries — perhaps in prolonging the useful life of tires. Green Xchange could enable Nike to license the air-bag technology selectively to noncompeting companies.

ACCORDING to Kelly Lauber, a global director in Nike’s Sustainable Business and Innovation Lab, sharing technology can have tremendous environmental impact. By sharing its water-based adhesive technology and working with footwear makers, Ms. Lauber estimates that average levels of environmentally harmful solvents used by Nike’s suppliers have decreased to less than 15 grams per pair of shoes from 350 in 1997.

Perhaps the biggest upside of Green Xchange may come from the development of communities that collaborate in innovation and the exchange of ideas. To encourage that kind of interaction, Salesforce.com will provide a search engine, making it easy to find patents. And collaboration platforms from companies like 2degrees and nGenera should make it easy to identify companies with common interests.

Despite the obvious advantages, sharing patents isn’t as easy as it might sound.

“Numerous features of the intellectual property system, particularly the ability of companies to claim large swaths of technology through patents, play havoc with collaborative efforts,” says Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Henry Chesbrough, the executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, says it is surprisingly hard to give away technologies. “If it is not done carefully,” he said, “the companies that use a donated technology might find themselves liable for infringement of another company’s patent.”

Both the Eco-Patent Commons and the Green Xchange pose organizational challenges for participating companies.

“Deciding which patents to pledge or license to a commons,” says Andrew King, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, “requires that the legal counsel, R.& D. staff, business unit and corporate sustainability groups all work together, and most organizations just aren’t set up for that.”

Weaving corporate togetherness, it seems, isn’t so easy — though green innovations offer many more reasons to try.

Werbach woke up the morning of December 9, 2004, with the hangover of his life. The previous night, he had stood at a wooden lectern at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club to tell a packed room of 250 people, including the leaders of environmentalism’s most influential organizations, that their movement was dead. He had become increasingly discouraged by a supposedly progressive movement that didn’t know how to be progressive with its own ideas. Within the first five minutes of the hour-long, 31-page speech, he announced with the tone of someone reading last rites: “I am done calling myself an environmentalist.”

In its effort to protect seal pups and redwood trees, he told his mentors, friends, and colleagues, the movement had forgotten human beings. What was needed, he said, was a new way of connecting sustainability to the aspirations of everyday people. “Make executive directors [of environmental groups] go to a red state and try to explain environmentalism to the average American. If they don’t have a plan to activate the values we share [with] the majority of Americans, then they need to move on.”

The next morning, Werbach was overwhelmed with the consequences of committing professional hari-kari. “I thought the speech would be cathartic,” he says. “It wasn’t.” His phone wouldn’t stop ringing, but the voices on the other end didn’t want to discuss how they could reimagine environmentalism. They wanted to tell him how wrong he was. The board at Common Assets, an environmental startup he’d been running, promptly fired him, leaving Werbach, who had a newborn daughter, without his primary source of income. Even worse, he had ousted himself from the very life he had always dreamed of. “I just remember thinking, ‘What am I going to do today, become a fireman?’”

Werbach had been drawn to environmental issues since elementary school. As a 7-year-old in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, he would check the daily smog reports before T-ball practice. By 13, he had persuaded his parents to let him open a checking account so he could become a “rainbow warrior” with Greenpeace. In 1990, as a high-school student, he walked into a campaign center working to pass “Big Green,” the sweeping voter initiative in California that would have promoted everything from fuel economy to open space. Werbach recruited hundreds of students to the cause. The initiative was defeated, but the morning after, his recruits were asking their accidental leader what to do next. By the time Werbach had graduated from Brown University in 1995, he had created the Sierra Student Coalition, the first national student-run environmental organization; today, it has 30,000 members.

It was this dynamism that got him recruited in 1996 for the monumental task of changing the face of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and oldest grassroots environmental organization. “When he was hired, people were probably expecting a scruffy kid with a beard and flip-flops,” says Jon Coifman, national media director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s certainly not what they got. He was articulate, smart, and had a real fresh take on things.” Werbach quickly realized he could use his youth to his advantage and questioned the Sierra Club’s every habit. Instead of focusing on policy, he set out to engage the public. During his first year in office, he toured the country giving more than 200 speeches, trying to reach young people. By the end of his second term, the average age of a Sierra Club member had come down to 37, from 47. But he felt that he was wasting time managing internal battles. And, he admits, “I was trying to push a lot of change very fast, so I think there were a lot of people frustrated with me.”

After his second term, Werbach moved on to more-entrepreneurial environmental efforts: starting Act Now, cofounding the Apollo Alliance to jump-start an alternative-energy economy, and picking up the Common Assets post. Restless and impatient, he was beginning to question not the goals but the methods of mainstream environmentalism. Then, in 2004, two colleagues, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, published a controversial essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” That led Werbach to phone the head of every major environmental group and ask one question: Have you achieved your goals? “They literally laughed at the absurdity of the question,” he says. But he wasn’t laughing. While he was in college, he says, “I helped create the largest desert park in the country, Death Valley, and I’ll proudly take my daughter there. Meanwhile global warming is going to turn the entire country into a desert.”

This realization seemed so urgent that he issued his manifesto at the Commonwealth Club. In the difficult months that followed, he recalls, he thought he knew what hitting bottom was like. Then Wal-Mart called. “It felt like proof that I was wrong.”

On Monday, October 5th, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order on Federal Sustainability – and in doing so, committed the Federal government to lead by example, practice what we preach and help build a clean energy economy through how we operate.

To harness the collective wisdom of the more than 1.8 million civilian employees and our men and women in uniform, we’re launching the GreenGov Challenge, an online participatory way for Federal employees to suggest clean energy ideas and vote on others.

Some of the top ideas will be presented to the Steering Committee on Federal Sustainability – a group comprised of a senior official from each agency who is responsible for delivering among other things, each agency’s sustainability plan.

Though anyone can see your ideas, only Federal employees can participate – so this is your chance to positively impact how your agency will meet its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target.

Be part of the GreenGov Challenge and help green our government!

The GreenGov challenge runs from Oct. 19^th — 31^st

Based on the conversations we had last week in class…is this a case of “Greenwashing”?

This article was suggested to you by Annie Hoeksma

San Francisco, CA — Levi Strauss & Co. and Goodwill have teamed up on a new initiative to lower the lifecycle impacts of jeans by giving consumers advice on how to care for them and what to do with them when they are no longer wanted. The initiative, A Care Tag for Our Planet, includes online and in-store messaging, and, starting in January 2010, a new care tag on jeans that encourages consumers to wash clothes less frequently, wash using cold water, line dry items when possible and, when items are no longer wanted, to donate the items to Goodwill. Levi Strauss & Co. – which was an early adopter of setting supplier requirements related to the environment, creating water quality guidelines and restricting substances from use in clothes – performed a lifecycle impact study of a pair of 501 jeans and found that the greatest opportunity for lowering impacts lies on the consumer side, after the jeans have been purchased.

By washing less, washing in cold water and line drying jeans, consumers can reduce the lifecycle climate change impacts from their jeans by more than 50 percent.

The new tags roll out on jeans in Levi’s retail and wholesale operations in January, and regional and global tags will be added in the fall.

The Federal Trade Commission in mid-June charged three companies, Kmart Corp., Tender Corp. and Dyna-E International, with making false and unsubstantiated claims that their paper products were “biodegradable.” Kmart and Tender agreed to administrative settlements in the cases against them, while the case against Dyna-E will be litigated. The FTC made this announcement in testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in a hearing titled, “It’s Too Easy Being Green: Defining Fair Green Marketing Practices.” While this sounds like a step forward in protecting consumers from greenwashing, other developments at the hearing indicated that the FTC is not on target for enacting new green marketing standards in mid-2009. After an FTC workshop last year, James Kohm, Associate Director of the Enforcement Division in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told Kevin Tuerff, CEO of Green Canary Sustainability Consulting, that the agency would issue new guides for the use of environmental marketing claims (”Green Guides”) around the middle of this year. Representative Bobby Rush, D-Ill., chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said at the hearing, “More than ever before, the shelves of our supermarkets, hardware, ‘Big Box,’ home improvement, and pet stores are being lined with goods bearing labels touting themselves as ‘natural,’ ‘biodegradable,’ ‘eco- friendly,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘carbon-neutral,’ ‘recyclable’ and ‘non-toxic,’ just to name a few.” Congressman Rush is also concerned about inauthentic green certification labels, noting, “For a fee, these companies will certify anything as green, affording false comfort to purchasers that the products meet environmental and safety standards.” Last year, under the FTC’s current review of the 1992 Green Guides, the agency held a series of workshops and plans to study consumers’ understanding of particular claims, such as “sustainable” and “carbon neutral,” which were not common when the FTC last updated its guides. EnviroMedia/Green Canary’s Kevin Tuerff, Steve Roberts and I participated in the workshops. We had a hunch the Feds would take a long time to act, which is why in January 2008 we created EnviroMedia’s Greenwashing Index, in conjunction with the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications. In Mr. Kohm’s Congressional testimony, he stated that the FTC does not set environmental standards or policy, but rather protects consumers from unfair or deceptive practices. According to a report by Reuters, Kohm said the FTC tried to collect feedback from consumers about perception and understanding of green claims, but didn’t receive many comments. “Without this data,” Kohm said, “the Commission would face the difficult choice of either providing guidance that might inadvertently chill otherwise useful green claims or forgoing valuable guidance altogether.” So now, nearly a year and a half later, the agency is well behind schedule and plans to conduct its own study of consumer understanding of green marketing claims. Their analysis of that data won’t be completed until later this year, further delaying the implementation of the new Green Guides. This division of the FTC has undoubtedly been under-resourced and needs more attention. Reuters wrote, “Depending on how new rules are structured, the changes could also provide a boost for startups that fall on the greener end of the spectrum in these sectors, as well as those working on tools for informing consumers or monitoring and measuring the environmental impact of companies’ operations.” We have confidence the Obama Administration will eventually deliver the new Green Guides. In the meantime, what’s a consumer to do? According to a January 2009 national study by EnviroMedia and Green Seal, 30 percent of Americans had no idea how to evaluate whether a company’s green claims are true. And another 10 percent blindly trusted the claims – that means 40 percent of Americans are very much in need of proper education on how to scrutinize green claims. That is all the more reason to update and enforce the Green Guides. A growing number of U.S. consumers (17 percent) are doing online research into a company’s green claims. The bigger question is whether marketers will continue thumbing their noses at authenticity in green advertising and our global environmental challenges. Our own ad industry doesn’t want regulation but isn’t stepping up to self-educate and enforce its own code of ethics.