Sustainability at Casual: Securing our Future

We are living at the best time ever to be alive. It can sometimes be hard to remember that though. With the huge technological and industrial advances that humans have made, our impact on our planet has got more and more profound. Concern around this grows by the day and a desire to do something about it is significant for any rational person.

This puts a business with a multinational footprint and global ambitions in a bit of a bind. How do we continue to build a business which delivers for our clients, and provides security and invigoration for our staff, and safeguards our planet for future generations? How do we use the amazing opportunities we've been given to minimise our impact and to return some of our good fortune to wider world?

This film we produced with Wall St Journal for Morgan Stanley highlights the one of the earliest victims of the climate crisis in clear terms.

With this in mind we have set a series of goals to minimise and mitigate our impact. To begin with though we wanted to share where we're at from an environmental and social point of view. This includes an audit of our impact for the financial year 2018/19. These numbers are our best calculations and are meant as a yardstick for us to refer to to judge how we're doing year to year - this is a work in process which we plan to add to and improve over the coming months and years. While this might make for a bit of a dry blog - we wanted to share it all here in the interests of transparency and accountability.

We should add that the impacts detailed below are from our internal operations - not from project work that we have undertaken on the behalf of our clients. We are have made some changes to our creative process to help our clients to understand and minimise the impact of their projects.

1. Environmental

Travel

UK internal

	No of Journeys	Miles travelled
Car	3	276
Taxi	57	906
Flight	7	19330
Rail	16	2232
Total	83

US internal

	No of Journeys	Miles travelled
Car	6	460
Taxi	256	2690
Flight	47	229741
Rail	20	5577
Total	329

Cycle Hire / Ferry	147

Flights:

Total output for air travel in financial year 2018-19 – 37.8 tonnes CO2e

Given a single transatlantic flight (London - New York) melts 3.3sqm/35.5sqft of polar ice (which makes us feel pretty bad), this is an important area for us to focus on. We have already reduced the number of management / board off-sites we have each year from 12 to 4 - this significantly reduces the amount of flying we do as a company.

We have also built a global network of trusted filmmakers so that we can minimise the impact of our work on our clients’ behalves.

Carpooling:

Where possible we use carpooling to help our staff get into and out of the office in LA and cities where cars are essential to get around.

Water bottles / Refuse:

The production industry is well known for its reliance on dreaded single use water bottles. We have purchased metal water canteens for all our staff to use and encourage all crew taking part in our shoots to bring their own water bottles. Where possible water is sourced from safe taps or refilled from large bottles of mineral water.

Where possible office staff / crew food should be bought with a view to minimising packaging. There may be instances where this is not practical and so a sensible approach should be taken.

CONTACT US

2. Energy:

It is our aim to have all energy for our offices sourced from 100% renewable sources. We have already made the switch in our London office (July 2019) and are in the process of moving over suppliers our New York offices. According to WeWork our offices in California will be 100% renewable by 2023 - which is better than nothing.

London - 97,000 KWH* ~ 26.90 tonnes of CO2e

New York - 21,230 KWH ~ 5.89 tonnes of CO2e

California - WeWork

* This figure is high and may be an inflated by a lack of a proper meter reading.

Carbon Offsetting

Our total carbon output as a company is 70.7 tonnes Co2e or 2.07 tonnes CO2e / employee. This gives us a baseline to aim for next year.

We are going to offset all our current output with certified offsetting projects through Carbon Footprint - watch this space for more on this.

3. Social:

Everyone at Casual Films is committed to sharing some of our good fortune with other people around the world. Here are a couple of the ways that we plan to do this...

The Casual Films Academy

What's the Casual Films Academy about then?

The Academy was founded in 2012 and provides free video production training to young people. It aims to broaden participation in our industry to those from non-traditional backgrounds. During the training, they make a video for a charitable cause who can then use it for their own promotions. Over the years we have trained over 100 young filmmakers in London, New York and Oakland. We plan to continue to hold these in all our home cities in the future.

Fair pay / Living Wage / Slavery policy

Casual Films is a signatory of the London Living Wage and is committed to paying the local living wage in each of the territories that we operate. We are also committed to working with suppliers who can demonstrate that they do not use slaves.

Helping our Clients

Low Carbon / Lowest Impact stickers

Nearly every time we produce a treatment we share three different creative approaches. This gives a range of creative ideas, budgets and timeframes to choose from. From now on we are going to start to use the two following stickers, to help our clients to understand the impact of the projects that they are commissioning.

Enviro Stickers

For internal productions - animations, stock edits, re-edits - where the majority of the energy used is from renewable sources we will be able to identify them as Low Carbon with the fetching sticker on the right.

If there are a series of three external productions we will identify the one with the lowest environmental impact with the 'Lowest Impact' sticker. This is for projects where there is an output but

Carbon Tracking

For clients of ours that are interested in tracking the carbon output of their production, we are able to offer this service on request.

Senior Management Commitment

Casual's directors' board are committed to fulfilling the points and goals outlined in this document. We will review and report back on it annually in September.

Check out more of our films - including some sexy new ones - by visiting our Vimeo channel. We've got everything from sustainability to skydiving on there so you're bound to find something to help you while away your lunch break...