Why this matters
Two women, with no studio behind them, built one of the first real operations for reclaiming what a film production throws away, an embedded crew, a warehouse, a standing department where before there had only been a dumpster. Anyone can found a good idea. The rare thing, the thing that makes EcoSet the proof, is that they kept it running, through a pandemic that gutted the industry overnight, since 2009. Almost no one in this field has earned that word the way they have.
The record
- Founded
- 2009, from a 2008 prototype on a Coen Brothers feature, A Serious Man, in Minneapolis
- Founder
- Shannon Schaefer Bart (now Senior Manager, Global Production Sustainability, Netflix)
- Executive Director
- Kris Barberg (joined 2009, partner since 2012)
- Headquarters
- Materials Oasis, 3019 Andrita St, Glassell Park, Los Angeles 90065
- Waste diverted
- 2,973 tons (EcoSet dashboard, May 2026)
- Resources donated
- $11+ million in reusable materials (May 2026)
- Bottles avoided
- 682,000+ (May 2026)
- Status
- Active. Women-owned. WBENC-certified since 2013.
What Shannon Schaefer Bart saw on film sets had no department name in 2008. There was no Eco Crew function, no sustainability protocol, no standard procedure for what happened to the materials a production left behind at wrap. Sets went to dumpsters. Food went to trash. Office supplies, furniture, lumber, and costumes went wherever the art department could arrange in the final chaotic days of a shoot, which usually meant nowhere useful. The industry had no mechanism to ask the question, because the question had never been made part of the job.
What Bart and Barberg built on A Serious Man in Minneapolis was a proof of concept for something that did not yet have a name. Over ten production weeks, the experiment diverted eleven tons of waste from incineration. Office supplies and furniture went to schools and nonprofits across the Twin Cities. Sets and construction materials went to independent filmmakers rather than into the waste stream. What they built next, in Los Angeles starting in 2009, was a new on-set department: not a consulting add-on, not a green initiative handed down from the studio, but an Eco Crew embedded in the production itself, working from pre-production planning through the final wrap day.
The years since have produced a particular kind of operational wisdom. The company survived COVID, when zero-waste targets that had reached ninety-percent landfill diversion dropped to fifty or seventy percent almost overnight as health rules pushed single-use plastics back across the industry. The adaptation, per Barberg's account to Sustainable Brands in July 2024, was to add logistics capabilities, diversify revenue, rent out warehouse space, and stay nimble. The Materials Oasis, EcoSet's physical reuse center in Glassell Park, is what the circular-economy idea looks like made concrete: nonprofits, schools, artists, theaters, and filmmakers come in by appointment and browse production discards at no cost. It won the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Green Leadership Award in 2017. Partnerships include TreePeople, with five trees planted per commercial shoot, and the Boys & Girls Club.
There is a vindication in where the founder went next. Bart created a role that did not exist, and the industry's largest engines came looking for it. She built the NBCUniversal Sustainable Production Program, implementing it across film and television worldwide, and is now Senior Manager of Global Production Sustainability at Netflix. The function she invented in a Minneapolis production office in 2008, the one with no name and no precedent, is now staffed at the top of the industry by the person who named it.
"2024 marks 15 years in business. We've honed our resilient business model based on adaptation and diversification, staying nimble and pivoting quickly. We survived 2020 by adding more logistics capabilities to our wheelhouse and renting out space."
Kris Barberg, Executive Director, EcoSet, Sustainable Brands, July 2024