Knights, Aliens and a Diplomat, Oh My: 10 of Hollywood’s Most Sustainable Sets
You may not be able to see it onscreen, but from major franchises to hit series, your favorite TV show may be doing its part to preserve the environment (or at least not eff it up any further), using solar and hydropower, reusable water bottles and electric vehicles.
When director Kat Coiro made her studio rom-com Marry Me back in 2019, she incorporated sustainable messaging onscreen, whether it was Jennifer Lopez’s character drinking from a reusable water bottle (a specially bedazzled S’well bottle) or Owen Wilson’s character packing his daughter’s lunch in a stainless steel PlanetBox lunchbox. But she didn’t feel like she had a full suite of tools at her disposal to reduce the environmental footprint of the actual production. At the time, Coiro felt like she was “a filmmaker out in the wild trying to make a difference.”
Cut to seven years later and Coiro says there’s been a sea change in the entertainment industry. “Now there are incredible teams of people who want to make our business behave more responsibly,” she says. In making her new feature You, Me & Tuscany, Coiro shot the movie with the support of Universal Pictures’ GreenerLight program, which the studio launched in 2023 to champion eco-conscious measures across the entire life of a production, from development and production to release.
2023 was also the year that Disney and Netflix launched the Clean Mobile Power Initiative, creating an accelerator to help the industry ditch diesel generators and make clean-power alternatives more readily available to productions.
Now the results of programs like this are starting to pay off, with film and TV crews making significant strides forward in reducing the use of fossil fuels that are warming planet Earth and putting both humans and wildlife at risk. “Across the industry, we’re seeing a lot of technical and technological progress, especially on the clean energy side, with a lot of productions demonstrating that solar, batteries and clean mobile power are really able to meet the rigorous demands of professional filmmaking,” says Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an industry consortium that counts nine entertainment companies in its membership, including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Netflix, Amazon MGM and A24. “We’re seeing these really innovative approaches of fully solar base camps, where the power is running from a solar trailer to a battery and using that to power things, shifting away from diesel generators,” continues Read. “As folks get smarter and technology gets better, we’re really seeing productions advancing the ball on sustainability.”
In 2025, a record 279 films and television shows received either a Green Seal or a Gold Seal (the highest rating) from the Environmental Media Association for their sustainability successes. And while Hollywood is still not exactly reining in consumption on some fronts — especially when it comes to air travel, from A-listers flying private to productions shooting in exotic locales around the world, lured by tax credits — there is hope that Hollywood is beginning to bend the curve when it comes to eco-friendly filmmaking. Here are nine films and TV shows making a difference.
KEY:
🔋 Alternative energy, including the use of batteries, solar and hydroenergy, or hydrotreated vegetable oil to replace fossil fuels and diesel generators.
🚛 Usage of any kind of electric vehicles.
♻️ Recycled or reclaimed materials used on set, and/or repurposed for other sets.
💧Reusable water bottles, instead of single-use plastic ones.