Eco Heroes: Elephant door sensors keep A/C off the streets

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>> We were the first one to become part of the Climate Action Registry and that whole purpose is to reduce our carbon footprint in a number of ways.

>> I think it's important for any of the high profile companies to be green, to show a leadership you know one step at a time, the way we have done at the studio. It's the little things and then it's a lot of little things that add up, they start making a difference trying to foster a green environment. Having the people look at, you know when they have little projects going on, what can they do? Can they do it in a green sense? This is a film studio. It's a box. Our largest stages have a million cubic feet of air space in them. In the old days they had inaudible and they'd just dump a lot of cold air in, and it'd be running full tilt tryin' to get the stage real cold in order to shoot. All the air conditioning would go off and the stage would get hot from all the lighting and everything. So what we've done is we've started with you know one show, we had a soap opera on the lot and it had to have quiet air and they had to have longer takes, so they had to keep the stage cold. So we brought in inaudible where we could keep the air conditioning running constantly. And it was much more efficient to do it that way. And then we just kinda continued to roll it out to the stages.

>> It started in electricity. It went to wood. It went to recyclables. It went, you know, into our waste diversion. E-waste and water, the challenge was to look into our day to operations and see how we can come up with a good conservation plan to reduce both, you know, and usage and you know our overall costs.

>> Everybody wants to do their part inaudible environment but the good ideas come from the people who are working in the various areas.

>> Teams got together from different areas within the departments and came up with great solutions for conserving air conditioning on sets, water in our operations for air conditioning and general use, wood diversion, DVD, CD, VHS recycling. We recycle our batteries, everything got taken into consideration and they met the challenge and we're, we have a pretty successful program going now.

>> Here at Studio Center we have 18 stages with over 22 elephant doors. The proximity switch can sense where the door is at and if it opens more than 36 inches and is left open for more than five minutes, it turns the A/C off until the door is closed again. So this cuts back on guys leaving the guys open for an extended amount of time and air conditioning the streets. This is gonna save us approximately 100,000 kilowatt hours a year per stage.

>> We're here at the CBS Studio Center recycling area. This is where we capture all of our waste product and separate it out into different 40 yard bins. And all of the 30, 40 yard bins, they're all dedicated to a certain waste stream. This waste stream is metal. It gets put together and shipped out to a metal recycler. This over here is from our greens department, from their landscaping activities and most of it will go back to get composted. We have here the L.A. Conservation Corps. They are a main group here in our recycling effort.

>> The Los Angeles Conservation Corps. is a non-profit organization here in the city that focuses on at-risk youth and trying to get at-risk youth trained to do all sorts of different jobs within the green sector.

>> They go through and capture all of our CRV material, all our paper, cardboard, and separate that out into bins so that we're able to capture those waste streams and divert it from the landfills. We've looked at new lighting material to replace some of our older lighting. The technology that we're currently using in the industry is, you know, 20 to 30 years old, but with the breakthrough of compact fluorescents, you know some of our other fluorescent tubes and LED it's just a matter of time now when we get to transition over to the newer technology.

>> Hello, I'm Dan Maltese.

>> And I'm Scott Pitters.

>> And we are the co-owners of Pulp Art Surfaces. We have made this new product out of recycled newspaper and cardboard to replace fiberglass and plastic practices in the past. This is the alley brick. It's an exposed brick look. This is a great example of what our motivation is. This is a traditional way of making brick skins out of fiberglass. It's been used for years and now it's also being made out of plastic which uses fossil fuels. We are now making it out of paper pulp which is made from recycled newspaper and cardboard. 10 of our sheets will save 19 gallons of oil to make it the old-fashioned way. It'll save one tree from being cut down because we're using recycled newspaper and it will save four cubic yards in the landfill because we're saving that recycled newspaper from going there.

>> It is very rewarding to, you know to see that we are actually making a difference, you know and it doesn't really take much. You know it doesn't take a huge capital investment. There are lots of things you can do on a day to day basis and that's what we're doing here. So everybody at the studio you know they're pulling together and doing the little things that count.

>> Everybody can be proud of the stuff they accomplish. You know everybody does a little bit, it all adds up and it becomes a big deal. I was taught to always take care of where we were and to leave it in a better place when we left. You know that's kind of what I want to do with my grandkids is to leave this earth a better place than it was when I started with it.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====