Making films burns fuel, draws power, feeds people and fills hard drives. This page sets out how we manage that, in our London office, on location, and in post, and what we can evidence if you ask us to.

Policy owner: Ed Smit, Managing Director
Last reviewed: 18 August 2026
Next review: March 2027
Contact: ed@herenow.film

Our policy statement

Here Now Films will:

• Treat the environmental impact of a production as a planning decision rather than an afterthought, because most of it is settled before anyone gets on set.
• Book crew local to the shoot wherever the role allows, and travel by rail in preference to short-haul flights and single-occupancy cars.
• Run off mains or battery power where it exists, and use a generator only where there is no alternative.
• Keep single-use plastic off our sets and out of our offices.
• Hire kit rather than buy it where hiring makes more sense, repair before replacing, and pass on what we no longer use.
• Be deliberate about what we store and what we keep. Data has a footprint.
• Ask the same standards of our freelancers and suppliers that we hold ourselves to.
• Measure before we claim. We will not publish an environmental number we cannot show the working for.
• Review this policy every six months, and whenever the way we work changes.

Signed electronically by: Ed Smit, Managing Director
Date: 18 August 2026

Scope

This policy applies to every production we run and every place we work from: our London headquarters at 124 City Road, our studios in Manchester, Bristol and Cornwall, client premises, locations, and post-production. It covers employees, PAYE staff, freelance crew, contractors and suppliers working on our behalf.

Where a client, a venue or a broadcaster holds environmental requirements stricter than ours, theirs apply.

Who is responsible

• Managing Director. Owns and signs this policy, and holds the budget for anything it requires.
• Head of Production. Applies it at schedule level — travel, crew locality, power, catering, waste.
• Producers and project leads. Raise the trade-offs while the treatment is still being written, and record what was decided.
• Everyone on the crew, freelancers included. Follow the working practices below, and flag anything wasteful.

Where the impact actually is

On a branded production, most of the footprint is decided in the brief, not on set. Four decisions do the heavy lifting:

• How many shoot days, in how many places. Two locations 300 miles apart is a different film, environmentally, from two locations in the same postcode.
• How big the crew is, and where they live. A six-person unit travelling from London to Manchester is six return journeys that a Manchester unit does not make.
• Whether anyone flies. One international leg can outweigh everything else on the schedule combined.
• How much footage gets shot, stored and kept. More cards means more storage, more transcoding, more review cycles, and a longer tail.

Lighting, catering and waste matter, and we manage them below. Travel is usually the bigger number.

If you want a genuinely lower-impact production, the conversation has to happen while the treatment is still being written. We will raise it there.

How we work on productions

Travel and crew

• We book crew local to the shoot wherever the role allows it. Our UK crew network runs to around 1,500 freelancers across London, Manchester, Bristol and Cornwall, which is why a Manchester shoot usually does not need a London van.
• Rail over short-haul flights. Rail over driving, where the kit list allows it.
• We consolidate vehicles. One van, loaded properly, beats three cars.
• We will not fly a unit to a job that a local unit can shoot, and we will say so at quote stage rather than after.

Power on location

• Mains or battery first. Diesel generators only where there is no supply and no workable alternative.
• LED lighting throughout.
• Kit off standby between set-ups, and charging consolidated in one place rather than spread across six hotel rooms.

Catering, water and waste

• No single-use plastic bottles. Crew get refillables and we find the tap.
• Catering ordered to the headcount rather than to the fear of running out. Leftovers go to the crew, not the bin.
• A plant-forward default on the crew menu, with meat as a choice rather than the assumption.
• Waste separated on location where the venue allows it, and taken away with us where it does not.

Kit, consumables and builds

• We hire rather than buy where hiring makes more sense, and we repair before we replace.
• Consumables are ordered per job, not per shoot day.
• We build very little. Where we do build, it is designed to come apart, and it finds a second home or a recycler before it goes in a skip.

Data, storage and delivery

This is the part most environmental policies in our industry leave out. Post-production has a footprint: rushes, proxies, renders, cloud sync, and the same master sitting in four places.

• We shoot with an eye on the card rather than the terabyte. More footage is more storage, more transcoding and more review time.
• Rushes are consolidated, not duplicated across every drive in the building.
• Delivery specs are matched to the platform. Nobody needs a ProRes master for a LinkedIn cutdown.

Offices and studios

• Separated waste and recycling across all four spaces.
• Equipment powered down rather than left on standby, including edit suites overnight.
• We are a small permanent team working from four bases, which keeps commuting distances short by design rather than by policy.

What we do not claim

Environmental claims in the UK are regulated — by the Competition and Markets Authority’s Green Claims Code and by the advertising codes — and this category is full of language that does not survive a follow-up question. So, plainly:

• We are not carbon neutral, and we do not describe ourselves that way.
• We do not buy offsets on a client’s behalf and present them as a reduction. Offsets are not reductions.
• We have not published a company-wide carbon footprint. When we do, it will be measured rather than estimated, and the method will be published with the number.
• We are not albert certified as a company. albert certification is awarded to productions, not to production companies, so nobody in our category holds it. We will name the productions that hold it when ours do.
• We do not hold ISO 14001. If your procurement process requires it, tell us and we will tell you honestly where we are.

If a production company tells you its shoot was carbon neutral, ask to see the calculation. It is a fair question and it should have an answer.

Freelancers and suppliers

• Crew travel by the means agreed in the schedule, and claim what they actually used.
• We ask hire houses, studios and location owners about power, waste and travel when we book. Where two suppliers are close on price and on quality, the lower-impact one gets the job.

What we ask of clients

The largest lever is yours, not ours.

• Put the sustainability requirement in the brief, not in the post-production notes.
• Be honest with us about whether the shoot needs three cities or one.
• Where the lower-impact option costs slightly more or looks slightly different, back it — rail instead of flights, one location instead of four, a local unit instead of ours on a train.
• If you need project-level carbon reporting, ask at quote stage. It is a line in the schedule, not a retrofit.

For procurement teams

On request we will provide:

• Written answers to your supplier environmental questionnaire.
• Our health and safety policy, evidence of insurance, and project-specific risk assessments — all listed on our policies and compliance page.

Email ed@herenow.film with the project name, the dates, and the questionnaire.

Questions we get asked

Do you have an environmental policy we can attach to a tender?

Yes. This page is it. We will also send it as a signed PDF on letterhead with the policy owner and review dates on it. Email ed@herenow.film with your tender reference.

Are you carbon neutral?

No, and we do not use the phrase. We have not published a company-wide carbon footprint. When we do, it will be measured rather than estimated, and we will publish the method alongside the number.

Is your work albert certified?

albert certification is awarded to individual productions rather than to production companies, so no company in our category can hold it. Where we work on a broadcast commission that requires albert registration or certification, we work to that requirement and the certification sits with that production.

Does a lower-impact production cost more?

Often it costs less. Fewer travel days and a crew booked local to the shoot usually reduce the budget as well as the emissions. The cost tends to appear when a creative decision is the thing driving the footprint — a specific location, a specific time of year, a specific person who has to be flown in. We show you that trade-off in the quote either way. See UK film crew hire for how the local-unit option works.

Who owns this policy and how often is it reviewed?

Ed Smit, Managing Director. Reviewed every six months and whenever the way we work changes. Next review: March 2027

Review and accountability

This policy is reviewed every six months, and immediately whenever the way we work changes — new premises, new kit, a new category of production. Each review updates the dates at the top of this page and the summary on our policies and compliance page.

Some of our work is made with organisations whose entire purpose is the environment — see charity and environmental video production for that work. Which is a reason to hold this page to a standard, not a reason to relax about it.

If something on this page is no longer true, we would rather hear it from you than leave it up. ed@herenow.film.