What is ‘sustainability’? In practice, sustainable behaviour takes three areas into consideration: social, financial and environmental. To improve their sustainability, organizations must safeguard social and economic resources and must not take more out of the planet than the planet can renew.
BS8909 is a specification established by the British Standards Institute for a sustainability management system for film, designed to help the film industry operate with greater sustainability. It uses the most widely adopted definition of sustainability, that of the World Commission on Environment and Development. It says that “sustainable development is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations”.
The BS8900 series of British Standards outline what sustainability management systems for filmmaking, events and procurement should include. This means that for BS8909, each film organization is free to identify the sustainability issues that are a priority for them, rather than conforming to a generic checklist.
Note: BS8901 – Sustainable Management for events.
British Standards usually apply either to companies or to products, however BS8909 aims to be more flexible and applicable. It can apply to a feature film as well as to a cinema, or a company working in the film industry. Complying with the new Standard shows that processes are in place so that a film company’s environmental impact is minimized and its social and wider economic benefits maximized to meet their own needs”.
Sustainable development (goal): “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
The triple bottom line (abbreviated as TBL or 3BL, and also known as people, planet, profit or the three pillars.
What is a standard? It is an agreed, repeatable way of doing something. It is a published document that contains a technical specification or other precise criteria designed to be used consistently as a rule, guideline, or definition. Standards help to make life simpler, as well as increasing the reliability and effectiveness of many of the goods and services we use. They are intended to promote good working practices across an industry, particularly as they use a common framework.
What is a management system? It is simply a framework for managing processes and activities to ensure continuous improvement over time; it follows steps to ‘Plan - Do - Check - Act’ (also known as the Deming Cycle).
Historically this Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle has proved an effective way of ‘holding’ organizations to their stated course. It has produced significant results for hundreds of thousands of organizations using other Management Systems Standards such as ISO 14001 for environmental management.
A sustainability management system (SMS) enables organizations to improve their sustainability performance.
Climate change: Change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability over comparable time periods (Source: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
Emissions Standards: Requirements that set specific limits to the amount of pollutants that can be released into the environment. Many emission standards focus on regulating pollutants released by cars but they can also regulate emissions from industry, power plants, small equipment such as lawn mowers and diesel generators. The 700 million cars currently on the world's roads produce 2.8 billion tons of CO2 annually. This represents 20% of the world's CO2 emissions.
Greenhouse gases: the current IPCC inventory includes six major greenhouse gases. These are Carbondioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), Perfluorocarbons (PFCs), Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).
IPCC: is a special intergovernmental body established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) to provide assessments of the results of climate change research to policy makers. The Greenhouse Gas Inventory Guidelines are being developed under the auspices of the IPCC and will be recommended for use by parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
ISO 14000– International Standards for the environment.
ISO 14000 Represents a critical milestone which resulted from the 1992 Rio Summit on the Environment .
ISO 14001 Is the cornerstone standard of the ISO 14000 series. It specifies a framework of control for an Environmental Management System against which an organization can be certified by a third party.