Our annual review includes updated figures which illustrate the impact the TV industry has on the environment.
Today sees the release of our annual review – and this year, we’ve gone interactive!
As with our previous reviews, we deep dive into the facts and figures which show the impact our TV industry has on the environment (as well as the improvements we’ve seen) and also highlights our collective achievements during a particularly turbulent period.
albert has been helping the production industry to measure its impact for the past decade, since launching the first version of its carbon calculator back in 2011.
Using the collected data, albert reports annually on the industry’s carbon impact. This year’s report looks back on data from 2020.
“2020 saw a 52% reduction in tCO2e per hour of TV production reducing from 9.2 tonnes to 4.4 tonnes
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To reach this figure, albert asks productions to measure their impact in a number of areas including the production office, studios and stages, days in the edit, materials, disposal, travel and accommodation. Questions are asked on a range of different activities from number of flights taken to litres of paint used on set. Brought together, the data allows albert to work out the average impact of an hour’s worth of broadcast television across all genres.
The reduction in carbon emissions in 2020 is partly a result of the pandemic, as the data shows a steep reduction in travel, accommodation and freight transport emissions.
The emergence and increased reliance on remote production and travel restrictions meant that flight kilometres reduced 5.1 million km helping the impact of the average hour of tv production reduce by 2.4 tCO2e alone. The majority of this reduction was seen in domestic flights which is really important as per km they are 7 times more polluting than rail travel.
1976 footprints calculated which is 645 more productions than in 2019-20
464 albert certifications awarded which is a 73% increase on the period of 2019-20 (196 more).
— Roser Canela Mas, albert International Manager“We are excited to be able to offer our toolkit to productions around the world. Using international carbon factors means that all productions, no matter where they are in the world can accurately build a picture of their environmental impact. I don’t believe there’s another tool out there for the production community like this
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2020’s global travel restrictions impacted the TV’s production industry, resulting in a reduction in emissions associated with people transport and the associated accommodation required on location.
This impact meant there was an overall reduction in emissions across the majority of production methods, particularly those reliant on international travel. In fact, in a ‘normal’ year, International Factual would have the highest impact of all production methods, but travel restrictions in 2020 meant Location and Studio based Narrative became the most emission intensive production method in this period.
As a counter to this, 2020 data shows road transport emissions increased – perhaps a result of the ‘one person one car’ covid rule. There was also an increase in material use – most likely due to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) which was required for production activities to continue through lockdowns.
Office energy use also increased. This may have been a result of higher heating demands, with fewer people on site using heat emitting equipment like computers
Find out more about the TV Industry's environmental impact