THOUGHT LEADER
BRIGHT IDEAS Cinelab in Boston is powered by a 250kW Solyndra solar array on the roof
designing equipment to support them. He’s seeing a big uptick in business. “In the past, I’d never had an eye on sustainability. But when your client wants something, you make it as fast, efficient and low-cost as possible,” he begins. “Much of that is operating costs as well, including regenerating chemicals rather than simply throwing them away.” But Lane has just embarked on a project to help build a new film lab in Paris and is listening to concerns about chemical effluent that didn’t exist ten years ago. EU environmental regulations – and France has sometimes been a leader in implementing them – mean these environmental improvements are no longer optional. The Paris client wants to outfit their lab with brand- new kit from top to bottom to support an already-existing rental and post- production business. Until now, they have been relying on a venerable French lab which continues to use decades-old equipment. With a rekindled interest in
film, is there an opportunity to reboot film capture and processing sustainably? Cinetech’s latest product is a film- cleaning machine designed to replace older tech left over from before the film downturn of a decade ago. Those older machines used a lot of energy as well as highly toxic perchloroethylene (aka tetrachloroethylene). Manufacture of the chemical was phased out under the Montreal Protocol, which banned ozone- depleting substances. But the machines continued to stay in use, reusing the chemicals cycled through the system. Perchloroethylene was finally abandoned and replaced by a new chemical cleaner from 3M, called hydrofluoroethers (HFE). “The 3M chemical isn’t ozone- depleting or a greenhouse gas, but they locked the licence, so you had to buy it through them,” says Lane. “It didn’t clean very well and evaporated horrendously, plus it was horrendously expensive.” 3M – recently in the news about hiding the toxicity of its wide-reaching
F ounded by Neal Romanek – former editor of Definition ’s sister magazine FEED – and Neil Howman, The Flint is M&E’s new global information hub for sustainability, covering all entertainment verticals and all parts of the content supply chain. WHAT IS THE FLINT?
Find out more at theflint.media
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