Dematerialization: How On-demand Movies Fight Climate Change

One of the problems that can ruin the best intentions of a green moviemaker is the carbon footprint created during distribution of the movie to the audience: shipping thousands of 35mm prints by truck, train, and plane around the world negate any goodwill you had with Mother Earth by using a 100% digital workflow and compostable flatware at craft services. Direct-to-Disc distribution via Netflix isn’t blowing up Gaia’s green skirt, either.

Canadian telecommunications engineer and blogger Bill St. Arnaud has a brain big enough to find the solution: Dematerialization. Quote:

One of the major ways we can reduce our CO2 footprint is through de-materialization where we replace physical products with virtual ones delivered over the Internet. Some studies indicated that we can reduce Co2 emissions by as much as 20% with materialization. I argue that dematerialization can be further amplified through carbon rewards (instead of Carbon taxes) where consumers are rewarded with a variety of virtual products in exchange of reducing their carbon footprint in other walks of their lives.

Dematerialization reduces the overall carbon footprint for a movie because it completely stops all production and distribution of content requiring film canisters or plastic discs and delivers the movie using Video On Demand (VOD) and other Internet-driven distribution methods. Salon’s GigaOM notes that’s better for the environment because it does not encourage craven consumption and collection of “stuff” when everything is available on a reusable low-power device connected to the cloud.

The one downside to all of this is the fact that 99% of consumers must live in an area where broadband is cheap and always available. Great news if you live in South Korea or Denmark, but if you live in Nebraska you’re probably screwed on that dematerialization thing. America needs a broadband policy and the smart people in the Obama Administration should consider offering carbon rewards to help build out a competitive, efficient, and ultimately green broadband infrastructure nationwide for content delivery. Although I fear that even though such a project would start with the best of intentions, it would end up just being another way for lonely guys to look at porn.

 Hmmm. Stimulus project?

Tags: Bill St. Arnaud, broadband, Content Delivery, Dematerialization, GigaOM, Salon