KEY POINTS:
Park Road Post, Peter Jackson's post production premises in Wellington, has cast a shade of green over the film industry.
Two years ago employees at the 10,000sq m building in Mirimar began transforming their work place turning off lights, taps and air conditioning and the results go beyond a reduced power bill.
It was head of corporate services Louise Baker's environmental conscience that prompted her to call on Landcare Research for an energy audit in 2006.
The report showed the company's biggest area of concern was its electricity and gas use.
So Baker promptly changed all the light bulbs to energy efficiency ones.
That helped shift the company's thinking, and Baker decided to get all staff involved with the energy-saving project, so it didn't seem to be a directive from management.
She formed a Greening the Screen committee, and staff from each department still meet once a month to generate ideas for energy efficiency.
Each department looked at possible energy-saving changes, for instance the administrative area found it easy to turn computers off at night, and to turn the lights off in the offices and bathrooms when they were unoccupied.
Important computer-based equipment cannot be turned off but the company has looked at areas where things can be turned off without having a negative effect on the business, Baker said.
In the middle of last year the company asked the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority for another audit and they established areas where the company could make further savings.
It changed the settings on its air-conditioning system and identified spaces that could go without it.
The laboratory side of the business consumes large amounts of water but has been working to reduce that, for instance it has a new method of exposing the sound track on print, which has greatly reduced the amount of water used at the processing stage.
As energy bills start to affect businesses across the country, Baker said she felt relieved the company was one step ahead.
Offering to provide the advertising for a book called Change the World for $15 free of charge, carefully recycling and composting their waste from the cafe are ways the company further works to promote green-ness.
Baker says the company aims to further reduce its consumption by looking at what fits with the company and being mindful of the energy it needs to spend. The company intranet encourages employees to do the same at home and staff are always bringing in new ideas, Baker said.
She said all businesses need to realise that New Zealand is not as clean and green as it thinks it is, and adjust their practices.
"There are opportunities for all industries to improve and the film industry faces a unique set of challenges.
"If every businesses did their best to reduce their energy consumption to what was needed, as opposed to just having it all on all the time it would make a huge difference to how many power plants we need."
