Leading International Industry Trade Bodies Unite with Ad Net Zero, Green The Bid and AdGreen In Endorsement Of New Hard Drive Use Best Practice

21 May 2024

In a first-of-its-kind response to the advertising industry’s need to decarbonize, Ad Net Zero has convened the 4A’s, Ad Association, AICP, ANA, AOP, APA, IPA, and ISBA, who have all jointly announced support for the adoption of best practices to encourage production hard drive reuse over single use.

The guidance, developed by Green The Bid, Ad Net Zero and AdGreen, aims to significantly reduce carbon emissions in production and lessen the burden on natural resources implicit in excessive hard drive usage.

In unanimous agreement, the above trade bodies for the ad industry endorse the statement:

“So long as hard drives have been wiped and tested before use, all ‘Enterprise Class’ drives can and should be reused multiple times during the manufacturer’s stated warranty period and provided such reuse would not put the production company in breach of any of its contractual obligations.”

Unlike the film and television industries, where hard drive reuse is common practice, the global commercial production industry primarily uses hard drives as single use items, often purchasing as many as two or three per shoot day of a production. Additionally, many more drives are frequently used throughout postproduction and archiving on every project.

What is the impact of hard drives in production work?

  • The carbon associated with an average 5TB hard drive, from manufacture to responsible disposal, is approximately 200-250kg of CO2e. Thus, using three hard drives per day on a standard three-day production results in roughly 2.25 tons of CO2e, equivalent to three one-way flights from New York to Los Angeles.
  • Demand for new hard drives also contributes to the unsustainable usage of the Earth’s natural resources, with global mining for overall materials being extracted at a rate that would require at least three planets to meet projected needs by 2050 and continuing to accelerate (UN Environmental Programme 2016 and 2024 reports).
  • Additionally, The UN also just issued a report predicting that the global population will generate 82 million tons of e-waste in 2030, and that we already generate enough to fill enough shipping containers to circle the earth every year, illustrating the importance of reducing our footprint from data usage and storage.
  • Finally, like many sustainability best practices, there are also economic benefits to being more mindful of resource use with significant cost savings.