As the 2024 Canadian Screen Awards (CSAs) kick off this weekend, CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes (pictured) is already celebrating a win. The long-running sketch comedy series has been awarded the Sustainable Production Award, recognizing its efforts to reduce its environmental impact on set.

Although the honour was first announced in March, the award is being formally presented today (May 30) as part of this year’s CSA celebrations. According to Tracey Jardine, executive in charge of production at Island of Misfits (IoM) Media Ventures, the show’s built-in flexibility has helped it significantly reduce emissions over time.

“Sketch comedy actually lends itself to sustainability fairly easily,” she tells Playback Daily. “We build and take down sets in the same day, and what has naturally evolved across the series is a mindset of repurposing, reusing, repairing [and] renting … It’s just more formalized now. It’s more recognized. It’s more openly discussed.”

According to a spokesperson for the series, its carbon footprint per hour as per the albert carbon calculator – developed by BAFTA for use in film and television productions – was 19.01 tonnes for season 30 and 16.9 tonnes for season 31. The latter figure is 20% lower than the albert average, the spokesperson says, and a third of the Canadian average. Comedies and dramas were the highest-emitting genres for CBC in 2023-24, with 61.3% of total emissions, or 61.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per hour.

While Jardine has been involved with This Hour in some capacity over the past two decades, she took on her current executive duties in 2020. The timing coincided with increased sustainability efforts from CBC, so Jardine decided to hire solely for that department, emphasizing experience in sustainability over film and TV. One of those hires, Elsa Tokunaga, had a degree in environmental science, and is now CBC’s environmental sustainability lead.

The improvement in carbon reductions wasn’t just down to switching to LED lights, Jardine explains. For example, since IoM rents the studio for shooting, they installed their own meters to measure their energy use separately. It also means switching to biodegradable containers for food, donating all leftovers to food banks, installing water dispensers throughout the studio and various support spaces, buying props and wardrobe secondhand and recycling every which way possible.

“Our key scenic painter does a remarkable job of saving and recycling paint,” says Jardine, measures that also save a lot of money in the long run.

The production also removed beef entirely from the catering menu and provides the team with public transit passes to encourage less driving. Not everyone can take public transit, though, Jardine admits, so “we are working towards integrating more hybrid and electric vehicles into our transportation fleet,” she says. “There’s not a lot of them [in Nova Scotia] that are appropriate for what we need.”

At the end of every season, the production calculates the cost of their carbon emissions at a dollar value and donates the amount to an environmental non-profit.

For other productions looking to up their sustainability efforts, Jardine recommends starting small by simply talking to the crew first. After 32 years, Jardine credits the hard work and flexibility of the This Hour crew for the production’s ability to adapt to new sustainability standards.

Image courtesy of Island of Misfits Media Ventures