Prioritising the Issues
To inform our thinking and ensure our Sustainability Plan is in line with the needs and expectations of our stakeholders, we conducted a series of interviews and an online survey to gather views and opinions on a range of relevant environmental and social issues. We engaged with Irish and international studios, with the Screen Guilds of Ireland, Screen Producers Ireland, and with a wide range of other organisations and individuals across the screen industry. Based on this, we completed a ‘materiality assessment’ to prioritise the issues that are most important to Screen Ireland and to our stakeholders. These are the issues that our Sustainability Plan focuses on.
Environmental Issues
- Decarbonisation – reducing the carbon impact of our activities
- Resource efficiency – using energy, water and materials efficiently
- Green procurement – purchasing ‘green’ goods and services Social Issues • Health, safety and wellbeing
- Diversity, equity and inclusion
- Fair working conditions across our industry and its supply chain
- Human rights across our industry and its supply chain
- Industry skills and talent
- Job creation and economic growth
Listening to what Stakeholders told us
We received lots of rich insights from the interviews and survey we conducted about what people across the industry think about sustainability challenges and the role they would like to see Screen Ireland play. Below are some examples of the kinds of things we heard and have taken into account when developing our plan.
- We need to embed sustainability into our productions but to do that we need to teach people.
- Having a sustainability manager or green crew on set would help to facilitate each department to do things more sustainably.
- Materials are a big challenge –sets and props etc. We use them for such a short time and that’s a high carbon count. Is there a way to design circularity into the set builds?
- Excess food is almost always one of the things that crews point out. For them, knowing excess food is being donated to the community and not wasted is important.
- The biggest weakness at the moment is that we don’t have a narrative of ‘here’s where it’s been done before’ in Ireland. There’s no sustainability culture nor a sustained communications campaign. Screen Ireland could help to change that.
- The social sustainability of crew and industry is a challenge –there are long hours and burn-out happens.
- I would love to see Screen Ireland appoint a person who looks after sustainability for the industry. Designs workshops and establishes processes and protocols and develops strategies to help production crews do things sustainably.
- On set the main challenge is bandwidth: everyone is doing so much and is so busy, so if sustainability is added to someone’s list, they are going to resent it.
- Screen Ireland could make it a condition of funding for productions to develop a sustainability plan and submit reports at different stages to show they are following through.
