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How to Go Green without Spending All of Yours.
Today everyone is either doing the earth-friendly program or is looking to see if you are doing your part. Sometimes, going green can be costly. Here at Taylore Studios we have made some of those changes and we have actually saved some money doing it. Here are a few tips on how we did it. Maybe you can benefit from it as well.
1. Those crazy swirly bulbs. At some point I noticed that we were using a lot of incandescent light bulbs. 100, 60 & 40 watt varieties were all over the studio for just the general lighting. I decided that it is time to change all those out to the fluorescent swirly style and see if they will work here. I went to the local store and found not only low wattage bulbs (10 watt replacements for 40 watt) but also I found them in 5600k sunlight correction as well. I decided to change all of the bulbs at one time. And as a pleasant surprise, the electric bill went down $50.00. So within two months, the bulbs paid for themselves. As a result of the bulb color; the clients seem to be more contented during their stay. I don’t know if it is supposed to have that effect. But here it does.
2. Let that tree keep growing. I am a bit of a tree hugger so we have always tries to conserve paper whenever possible. Much of our business is phone calls and email based. We send emails with contracts attached so there is only one document printed at the time of signing. By the way, shredded documents make great cat litter.
3. Paper or plastic? When possible, we will minimize us of paper documents and have items on web viewing only. Our plastic discs for CD’s or DVD’s that are no longer useable can be recycled here locally. My wife makes sure that all other plastic and aluminum cans get recycled as well. Simple and at no cost to us. (I think my wife is cashing in on the aluminum cans for shopping money)
4. Got Gas? Fuel prices are down right now this has given us the opportunity to get the vehicles tuned to maximize gas mileage. Simple things can make a difference for you as well: Fuel up first thing in the morning, and always use the slowest setting on the nozzle. Both of these together reduce how much gas turns to vapor before it hits your gas tank. Also, keep your tires inflated to proper levels I’ve gained about 5% in mileage since I keep up on tire pressure. Empty out all that junk in your car. The more your vehicle has to carry, the worse mileage you get.
5. Let the river flow not your faucet. All of our fixtures are water saving devices. We have come a long way since the first years of water saving toilets that you have to flush twice. An investment in washers and proper plumbing goes a long way to save you money with the water bill.These are just a few ideas to get you started turning company into a green company. Without spending all of your green (Money that is).
Hawke Taylore
Taylore Studios
Audio Visual Consortium -
5 Replies
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[Hawke Taylore] ” I decided that it is time to change all those out to the fluorescent swirly style and see if they will work here. I”
Yes, they are nice, but of course there is mercury in the bulbs. So now the trend is moving towards LED lighting. Funny, we helped cut our electric bills, thus “greening the planet” but now we have billions of mercury laden light bulbs to dump in the landfills.
We actually edit an entire environmental series here and I was talking to the Producer just recently about this conundrum……
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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I didn’t know about the mercury. If it’s not one thing its another. well at least all of our ouside lighting is Solar LED. And that has helped our bill as well.
Hawke Taylore
http://www.TayloreStudios.com
http://www.AudioVisualConsortium.com -
The mercury “threat” in Fluoro bulbs is overblown, it’s a wee little bit of vapor, not like emptying an old-fashioned thermometer into a puddle on the floor. Though they need to go to proper disposal, you needn’t fear a hazmat van if you break one. LED based lights are exciting and getting better all the time, but I think we’re still talking ten or so years before they truly supplant Flos AND incandescents. And you have to remember that the manufacturing of the various lights is no snow-white process either: chip fabs and LED fabs and PV solar cell fabs and the like are among the dirtier industrial processes, in tems of water use, heavy metals, etc. and so a comprehensive evaluation of what constitutes “greenest” has to take the entire loop into account, find a balance across the spectrum.
Flouros in your studio also mean less heat generated, and this leads to a significant savings from less need to run your noisy and power-hungry air conditioning. Not to mention they last a long time before needing replacements.
Other tricks you can use in and around your facility include: using a white roof coating when you re-do the roofing, instead of heat-absorbing black tar. Cuts waste heat and local heat in your microclimate around the building quite a bit, that means your HVAC bill goes down and it’s nicer to stand around outside, even open a window instead of turning on the AC. Your traditional concrete or asphalt parking lot makes a difference too. LEED certified building projects use modifications like gravel, which lets the water absorb into the soil instead of runn off to carry oil and pollutants into runoff and sewers. If gravel isn’t an option, there is a concrete tile that leaves little perforated gaps to pass the water thru as well. This type of surface adds traction and also lets snowmelt get out of your way instead of standing and re-freezing as ice, a safety feature. Some is sold as water-permeable or foam concrete. Parking lots can reflect a lot of heat onto their nearby buildings, so if you can avoid the black asphalt, you’re ahead of the game. Strips of grasses and small low bushes along the perimeters not only look good but catch and retain rain runoff, again, helping the environment.
Need sound blankets or more wall insulation? You can now get them both made from recycled denim jeans fabric! My local U-Haul store sells some. Architects can specify it in new construction or remodels.
Googling tips on LEED certification-worthy practices will get you a lot of these kinds of tips. Some cost money, but many others don’t, they just let you look at old practices in a new way.
I did a video on a project IKEA was experimenting with: they were feeding their in-house restaurant scraps into a worm farm, which was housed in a regular semi trailer. The red wigglers were like piranhas in a James Bond movie, attacking the leftover Swedish meatballs and salads and devouring the entire waste load in about an hour! The worm trailer can stay on premises if you have the room, or make a number of stops on a run from place to place, taking in your organic food waste and converting it very rapidly into great topsoil, as well as worm “tea” liquid fertilizer, both of which are sellable commodities. The trailer owner makes his money taking this stuff away and the restaurants and large corporate cafeterias don’t have to pay for garbage pickup for the organics. As part of the project, we saw an office that had a mini worm farm in the breakroom for handling food waste, a small rubbermaid tub with a lid, you’d have no notion what it was if it wasn’t labeled… When done correctly, it has no smell at all, not from the food OR the worms. It does take a little work to get folks onboard with separating their organics and putting them in the worm bin instead of throwing everything into a trash can. I imagine, this job, like many others in production, will get “farmed out” to the ever-useful interns:-)
Yes, not everybody is going to go to the lengths of worm farms and the like, but there is a huge variety of things out there, large and small, that you CAN try out and use to save yourself money as well as be green in the bargain. Worth looking into.
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Geeee-gross. And all this time I thought “being made into worm food” meant losing the gig.
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And they are all made in China. As a Canadian based producer, that irks me. ( Although recently most incandecents were imported as well)
George Socka
BeachDigital
http://www.beachdigital.com
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