Celebrating Green Crew Heroes! Adam Barone, Co-Founder and MD of Sonic Union
Green The Bid Crew Heroes is a series that highlights individuals who bring sustainable practices to any area of the production process, and seek to inspire others to do the same. Production can’t happen without all crew-members (both on set and off), and the same is true of their support of Green The Bid.
Here Green The Bid’s Jessie Nagel talks to Adam Barone, Co-Founder and MD of Sonic Union.
J.N. Where did you grow up and how did it inform how you do your job today?
A.B. The Western New York shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Grey skies, great people. Depression-era grandparents who would say “close that light” and “it’s not cold in here, you’re not wearing your hat!”. Being a scrappy bootstrapper forced necessary savings wherever I could find them, (never bought new furniture, for example) and as I got older and could pay those bills, began to notice the toll on the environment in many ways and the infrastructure we’re leaning on.
J.N. What are some things you do to be more sustainable at work, and what things would you love more post companies and individuals to adopt?
A.B. Utility costs are one area we’ve always been able to monitor closely and manage down. Between lighting swaps, and tightly managed HVAC settings and schedules and logic, we’ve been able to bring our consumption and demand costs way down and eliminate wasteful cycles from when we opened in 2008, despite having much more people and gear. I learned a lot about controlling demand from one of my first jobs doing maintenance at McDonald’s. The manager was very savvy on energy costs and we staggered how things were turned on to trick the system.
It’s not evident that we are big consumers of energy or natural resources in post, but knowing that our assets from 2016 are going to be on spinning disks in a data center really bothered me. We need more solutions for cold storage that are similar to what Dternity offered until recently - tape library on the back end, hard disk on the front end. No energy consumed until retrieved. I have been pressing Wasabi for such an option, despite their pricing that makes hot storage competitive with colder storage. Simply for the waste factor. Such as spindown disks, etc.
J.N. What are the things you have changed in your own life to be more environmentally conscious?
J.D.A.B. Car-free for past 19 years; bike more; dress warmer in winter, cooler in summer or use a fan rather than rely on central AC/heating solely; travel less; avoid plastic bevs whenever possible (i could be better at this). I do stress out on whether it’s better to use resources to wash out an empty peanut butter jar in order to recycle it, or discard it.
J.N. Who most influences you and inspires you when it comes to being socially and environmentally responsible in your work life and your personal life?
A.B. I remember my grandmother washing off an ice cube that she dropped, using more water than to make another. What I didn’t realize was, she used to not be able to ‘make’ ice - it had to be purchased after being cut from the lake, transported in hay to her icebox just to get refrigeration let alone freezing. Her shady porch served as a de facto fridge 10 months of the year it seemed. So, I just learned to be waste-avoidant unless I really need that convenience.
Even when we offered food delivery lunch for staff, I asked that it be grouped to 2 sources per day so that they could combine their deliveries and save the trips, the elevator trips, the congestion factor, etc.
J.N. If you could do any other job - in the industry or otherwise - what would it be and why?
A.B. I don’t think that I would want to do any other job in the industry per se - I love what I’m doing, having invented and reinvented my own job time and again. If anything, I would love to work more directly with end customer more in any capacity. I sometimes feel pretty far removed from the persons that are most impacted by our work, compared to, say, the customers that came into my grandparent’s drug store. I often feel that I mostly work for my staff, and that’s by design - that’s what we/they need. It would be super cool though to operate a backhoe, or drive the big rigs. Maybe for a month….
----- Are you a crew hero or do you know one? We want to hear from you!
