Illustrated by Tael Gomes When director Kat Coiro made her studio rom-com Marry Me back in 2019, she incorporated sustainable messaging onscreen, whether it was Jennifer Lopez’s character drinking from a reusable water bottle (a specially bedazzled S’well bottle) or Owen Wilson’s character packing his daughter’s lunch in a stainless steel PlanetBox lunchbox. But she didn’t feel like she had a full suite of tools at her disposal to reduce the environmental footprint of the actual production. At the time, Coiro felt like she was “a filmmaker out in the wild trying to make a difference.”
Cut to seven years later and Coiro says there’s been a sea change in the entertainment industry. “Now there are incredible teams of people who want to make our business behave more responsibly,” she says. In making her new feature You, Me & Tuscany, Coiro shot the movie with the support of Universal Pictures’ GreenerLight program, which the studio launched in 2023 to champion eco-conscious measures across the entire life of a production, from development and production to release.
2023 was also the year that Disney and Netflix launched the Clean Mobile Power Initiative, creating an accelerator to help the industry ditch diesel generators and make clean-power alternatives more readily available to productions.
Now the results of programs like this are starting to pay off, with film and TV crews making significant strides forward in reducing the use of fossil fuels that are warming planet Earth and putting both humans and wildlife at risk. “Across the industry, we’re seeing a lot of technical and technological progress, especially on the clean energy side, with a lot of productions demonstrating that solar, batteries and clean mobile power are really able to meet the rigorous demands of professional filmmaking,” says Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an industry consortium that counts nine entertainment companies in its membership, including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Netflix, Amazon MGM and A24. “We’re seeing these really innovative approaches of fully solar base camps, where the power is running from a solar trailer to a battery and using that to power things, shifting away from diesel generators,” continues Read. “As folks get smarter and technology gets better, we’re really seeing productions advancing the ball on sustainability.”
In 2025, a record 279 films and television shows received either a Green Seal or a Gold Seal (the highest rating) from the Environmental Media Association for their sustainability successes. And while Hollywood is still not exactly reining in consumption on some fronts — especially when it comes to air travel, from A-listers flying private to productions shooting in exotic locales around the world, lured by tax credits — there is hope that Hollywood is beginning to bend the curve when it comes to eco-friendly filmmaking. Here are nine films and TV shows making a difference.
KEY:
🔋 Alternative energy, including the use of batteries, solar and hydroenergy, or hydrotreated vegetable oil to replace fossil fuels and diesel generators.
🚛 Usage of any kind of electric vehicles.
♻️ Recycled or reclaimed materials used on set, and/or repurposed for other sets.
💧Reusable water bottles, instead of single-use plastic ones.
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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO)
Image Credit: Steffan Hill/HBO 🔋💧♻️
Praised by the former economy minister of Northern Ireland for its “commitment to sustainability on set,” HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff hired both a sustainability adviser and a coordinator to help green the 82-day shoot.
Energy After identifying fossil fuel as the biggest contributor to a production’s overall carbon footprint, the team replaced a 100kVA diesel generator with a utility power installation, avoiding 19.5 million tons of CO2 emissions. A combo of Husshpod-brand battery energy storage systems and hydrotreated vegetable oil or HVO (which offers up to a 90 percent reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions) allowed the production to avoid nearly 45,000 gallons of fossil fuel use.
Materials Aluminum water bottles and jugs filled with H20 for refillable bottles kept 108,080 single-use plastic water bottles out of landfills. Large amounts of reclaimed timber were used for sets, and when the production needed to purchase plywood, 100 percent of it was responsibly produced product (of which 67 percent was FSC certified).
Extra Points: Joust away! Horse manure from the shoot was given to Glenarm Castle, a principle filming location, to fertilize its public gardens.
