Hollywood’s feature films are greening up their productions thanks to the Producers Guild of America (PGA) Green Committee. Founded in 2008, the committee is reaching out to productions worldwide, reducing their carbon footprint and leading the industry in the fight against climate change. They are replanting trees, keeping Styrofoam out of their catering services, and recycling costumes, paints, props and fabrics.

“The Producers Guild of America (PGA) is a national non-profit trade group committed to protecting the rights and credits of producers in film, television and new media. Given the current climate crisis and the significance of the environmental impacts of film production, a movement is growing to support sustainable production practices,” said Amanda Scarano Carter, Co-Chair of PGA Green Committee West.

While it is the producers who have joined forces to encourage people to limit their environmental impact, they are getting some celebrity help. On the set of “Knight & Day”, Cameron Diaz has been proactive. She made sure there were no plastic bottles on the set, and that recycle bins were placed all around. “It makes it a lot easier when you have someone as influential as Cameron Diaz setting the tone,” said Fred Baron, Chair of the PGA Green Committee.

The committee’s website provides tools for industry professionals to exchange ideas and make suggestions about greening the filmmaking process. In the near future the committee’s website will become an environmental portal for the six major studios and film industry as a whole. It will feature a carbon calculator and a green marketplace where sets, costumes, and movie accessories can be exchanged. “I am very excited about the direction we are going,”  Baron said.

The PGA Green Committee also is taking their sustainable efforts off the set. This past Saturday, they joined with the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles to green up a Lynwood, California community. The project will put up LEED-certified houses.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Only a few years ago, you couldn’t give old wood away. Dilapidated barns and falling-down sheds were a nuisance to most people who owned them; they’d actually pay you to come haul the stuff off.

Boy, how things change. Daniel and Amy Balog find it ironic, and exciting, that reclaimed wood has become fashionable. The Tennessee-based furniture makers are riding that trend simply doing what they do best – reusing old things and creating cool, utilitarian designs.

With 11th Hour Furniture, which uses 100 percent reclaimed wood for its striking mission and shaker-style furnishings, they aren’t jumping on the trend-wagon or trying to get rich off materials that were given to them (by nature and by neighbors), as many reclaimed-wood designers are doing. They’re after something different, aesthetically and otherwise.

“We want to get everybody a table. There’s a lot of guys out here that only want to sell one or two  a year and charge $12,000. I want to sell 200 and charge $800. That’ll help the environment, and it’ll be nice and you can hand it down to your kids and grandkids,” says Daniel, a lifelong recycler who studied design and sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

The artist and his wife, a geologist, went into furniture design after moving their family to a plot of land Daniel owned outside Pikeville, TN, several years ago. Then in 2006, the couple segued into something that felt more, well, natural to them – starting 11th Hour, which mostly harvests its wood from old barns in the area, and whose provenance can often be traced through generations of the same family. The company also follows strict, self-set green guidelines – working with local or regional woods; using non-toxic finishes (typically Mike Mahoney’s Bowlmaker brand); running an energy-efficient workshop; purchasing carbon offsets from CarbonFund.org, and of course recycling all scraps.

But unlike many other reclaimed-wood workers, they start from the ground-up, literally and figuratively – ascertaining the customer’s needs and designing pieces to spec, even offering to take the client on-site to check out the source.

Other designers of note who fit this category but are substantially more expensive include Live Edge on Vancouver Island and Hudson Furniture in New York City.

“Our whole thing is truly green from the harvesting of the wood to the time they come pick it up. We try to use everything we can of the barn,” says Daniel Balog, explaining that wood considered flawed by some designers has a peculiar beauty to him.

“It’s all a mystery to us. …  Some of the (salvaged) pieces are not good looking, but when we start matching them up – and a lot of them have bee holes and nail holes – it just works. I’ve got 10,000 feet of harvested wood in back of the shop (locals now call them to offer wood). Or if the client wants to come out here, they can pick them out” – something encouraged by the Balogs, who also give discounts to clients who pick up their own furniture.

“We have a lot of customers lately from New York that are really into the white pine and not a lot of knotholes,” he says, “but the majority of people that want it say, ‘Build me a table. I don’t care what it looks like or how many beeholes it’s got.’ …  We know the people that have these barns, so we have this whole history around it. We can say, ‘It’s the Blankenships’ old barn, they were third-generation millers.’ Or, ‘It’s the Evans’ barn’.”

But there’s more to the reclaimed-wood movement than its greenness or trendiness. It’s the epitome of holistic design.

We’re too familiar with the downsides of the holiday season. Bags of new things come into the house and get hidden in already-full closets and drawers. Boxes of decorations come out of their hiding places, muscling their way into your living space. Wrapping paper and ribbons multiply like guppies, scissors and tape go missing, cookies come out of the oven and the doorbell rings. When it’s all over, we work to find places for the new stuff, stash the decorations again and vow to make next year different.

Guess what. It’s next year.

What if – indulge us here, for a moment – what if you could simplify first this year, getting rid of things you don’t use, recycling them where they’ll be appreciated? What if you could make space now, and begin the New Year with closets that don’t look like they’ve been through a natural disaster?

You can. And you’ll feel so good, because one computer, one stuffed animal or one pair of old athletic shoes can change a life.

“You’ve heard the story about the young person tossing starfish back into the ocean when they washed up on shore and were in danger of dying in the hot sun, right?” asked Barry Cranmer, president of the Share the Technology computer recycling project. “Someone asks why she was bothering because there were so many and she wouldn’t be able to rescue them all, so it wouldn’t really make any difference.

“As she tosses another back into the water, she says, ‘it will make a difference to this one.’ “

Take a quick tour of your closets, the basement, the garage. Are there books, tools, sports equipment you no longer need or use? Old towels, a wedding dress, a wheelbarrow?

Let’s save some starfish.

The kids’ room

Kendra Robins knows her territory. The founder of Project Night Night, a program that gives books, stuffed animals and blankets to homeless children, learned when she had her son that not all toys find their forever home the first time around.

Children “find their favorites, and those get super-loved,” she said. “The other ones sit on a shelf, looking cute. Things are either tattered beyond recognition or nearly pristine.”

This year, in its fourth year of operation, Project Night Night will distribute more than 25,000 tote bags to kids who don’t have homes. Each bag will include a brand new blanket, at least one children’s book, and at least one gently used stuffed animal, most of which have been donated from kids’ rooms just like yours.

“Shelters use them for welcome gifts. All of this is new and very scary to the child, and some of the shelters are not that nice. A lot of kids are frightened, and having a stuffed animal helps,” Robins said. Books are important because homeless kids often have lower academic achievements than others. And the blankets give them something new, all their own, to cuddle for security.

Project Night Night has drop-off locations in Phoenix, Arizona, the Bay Area in California and in Solon, Ohio, and five mailing addresses around the country. You can also work with the organization to keep your donations in your own community. Project Night Night sells its Tote Bags online for $3.50; you commit to packing them and donating them to a shelter of your own choosing or one of the 300 shelters with which they already have affiliations.