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The red carpet got a lot of attention at the Oscars this year — but it wasn’t just because of who was strolling on it.

On March 16, the day after the 2026 ceremony, production assistant Paige Thalia posted a TikTok of herself arriving at the Dolby Theatre. As crews broke down the awards show setup, she had hopes of taking a piece of the carpet home to use as a rug in her apartment. The video follows her stumbling upon dumpsters with rolls and rolls of the Oscar red carpet inside and lugging one section back to her place as prized new decor (after a good vacuuming).

The TikTok quickly went viral, racking up more than 6 million views, with hundreds of commenters expressing shock and horror that the Oscars carpet would be used for just a few hours and then be thrown away. Suddenly, the Academy found itself getting beaten up on social media as yet another grotesque example of Hollywood’s wasteful ways.

As it turns out, though, there’s a bit more to the story.

For starters, the dumpsters full of Oscar red carpet material were actually en route to being recycled, confirms Rob Thiess, co-director of the California Carpet Stewardship Program of CARE (the Carpet America Recovery Effort). Thiess tells THR that CARE has worked with Event Carpet Pros Inc., which supplies the Oscars carpet, for the past four years; from the Dolby, the carpet is transferred to the Los Angeles Fiber carpet recycling center in Vernon, where it is broken down into pellets. Theiss says these carpet pellets can be made into about 125 different products, including computer cases and car parts.

The Academy adds that the Oscars carpet is itself made from recycled materials.

Unfortunately, this sort of environmental mindfulness is not the norm. Hollywood puts on hundreds of events each year — premieres, galas and FYC events — and the majority of the time those red carpets are not recycled. More often than not, they end up in the trash, particularly those with customized designs, logos and cuts that make it tough to be reused.

“So many people still don’t know that carpet is recyclable,” says Theiss. CARE supports more than 179 public drop-off sites throughout California (which is drastically ahead of other states in this initiative) and collects 80 million to 90 million pounds of carpet per year, but most of that comes from residential sources. And so he is making a push to get Hollywood on board as well, having already locked up a deal to recycle the carpet at next year’s Super Bowl in L.A., on top of his work with the Oscars. But because entertainment events are so fragmented — with different studios, streamers, event planners and carpet companies involved with each one — it has been slow going to organize a carpet recycling system for the larger industry.

“Quite frankly, it’s really low on the totem pole when it’s dollars and cents on the front side and making sure that production goes smoothly,” Theiss explains. “When it comes to breakdown, it’s just, ‘Get it out of here, on to the next,’ ” as he admits it’s “not a glamorous thing” to think about.

Sheila Morovati, founder and CEO of environmental nonprofit Habits of Waste and a longtime advocate pushing to make Hollywood more sustainable, notes that carpets don’t necessarily need to be broken down into pellets to get re-purposed. She points out that carpets could easily be donated to schools or homeless shelters after their big moments. Or, perhaps more likely in the bottom line-driven entertainment industry, she suggests studio storage facilities — much like the storerooms used for costumes — where “red carpets can go and live and be clean and ready to be installed. And then they just roll it back up and bring it back into these warehouses so that the studio just holds onto it,” which would save on the cost of getting a new carpet for each event.

Environmental Media Association CEO Debbie Levin also makes a case for increased use of rentals: “I don’t understand why renting a carpet would not be the way to go because then it’s being reused constantly. They’ve got every color in the world, and you really don’t need a logo on a carpet because [photographers and press] are not shooting that.” She adds, “There’s so much material that goes into a carpet, and not all of it is made from the greatest materials, so at least if you’re using it 50 times, you could feel better about it.”

It would, of course, take extra thought and planning to make this happen, which may be a tough ask for a business focused more on the big on-camera backdrops than on how to properly dispose of the backdrop afterward. But, as Theiss notes, that disposal process is key, especially for carpet material that “doesn’t break down for 100 million years; it doesn’t produce methane gas, it can’t be collected and make power generation out of it. It’s just an unruly material that fills up our space.”

He continues, “We’ve got to think about our future, our kids or grandchildren and what we’re leaving. We have how many capped landfills and how much material is in there that won’t break down? So [it’s about] really focusing on that and then taking those materials and turning them into new products.”

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Sustainability Issue. Click here to read more.

Call him the anti-paperboy.

Steve Vitolo first came from Boston to Los Angeles as another writer with a dream, starting as an assistant when he began to notice a disturbing trend on set. “On this one show, we kept printing a revised script every single night for 100-plus people, 50 pages. So every single night, it was literally 5,000 sheets of paper that would then be obsolete by the next day,” he recalls, as he was tasked with the script delivery.

That was more than a decade ago now, with each new line of dialogue or director’s note resulting in massive paper waste — and others around him also waking up to the problem, without much of a solution. Which led Vitolo, who would go on to write for shows including Black-ish and Hot in Cleveland, to ask, “Why are we writing scripts digitally and then printing it on paper? Who uses paper now? We’re all using computers.”

And so Vitolo — already with a love of tech and background working on websites — co-created Scriptation (and now serves as its founder and CEO). The software allows actors, directors, writers and crews to take notes and mark up their scripts digitally while easily migrating those annotations over to revised versions. The app also enables people to add photos, voice memos and various other personalized features to their documents — appealing even to those who aren’t necessarily making a choice to be sustainable but are drawn in by the ease. It’s always been that two-pronged approach, looking to solve both productivity and environmental problems and reach beyond just the eco-conscious community.

The company launched in 2016 and gained traction during the COVID shutdown, when people had a moment to learn a new technology. It took time, trying to convert an entire industry one by one — in what Vitolo describes as “this ground-up thing” — but word slowly spread, and today it has 25,000 active monthly users across more than 50 countries.

From April 2023 to this April, Scriptation users have eliminated more than 120 million sheets of paper from production sets worldwide, according to Vitolo; last year’s total of 48 million sheets alone equates to more than 5,700 trees preserved, more than 5 million gallons of water conserved and 3.3 million pounds of CO2 emissions avoided. On a personal level, each Earth Month, beginning in 2024, Scriptation has sent users a Green Impact Report (à la Spotify Wrapped) to estimate their own personal water, waste and carbon savings.

And new innovations are coming, as this spring Scriptation launches Playback, a feature that lets users listen to scripts read aloud in customizable voices (via AI). It comes at the request of executives who want to review scripts during their commute and saves them from reading on paper at home.

Word-of-mouth and listening to industry feedback has been key to Scriptation’s Hollywood success, with Michael B. Jordan, Kathy Bates and the teams behind Hacks, Dexter and Saturday Night Live as effusive supporters.

Hacks co-creator Lucia Aniello — who along with fellow showrunners Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky has had a longtime commitment to sustainability on the show — says she learned about Scriptation through her assistant director and was drawn in both by the program’s organizational benefits and the fact that “I have always felt there was too much paper waste” on sets. “There will always be something lovely about having a physical script in your hand, but with the endless revisions needed, it just feels irresponsible to print them out for every iteration,” she adds. “Let’s save the trees for the first and last drafts, in my opinion!”

Jennifer Phang, a director and member of the DGA’s Sustainable Future Committee, became aware of the software from a VFX supervisor on one of her sets and was impressed by the way “everyone was walking around with their iPads making notes; they looked so cool, everything was so clean and kept-together.” Though she acknowledges the additional step of having to make sure the iPad is charged every day, Phang has been using it on her projects — which include episodes of The Boys and The Flight Attendant — for years and adds, “If you see all the paper distributed in any given production office, it can be a lot. You could be saving reams and reams and reams of paper by going paperless on a production.”

Scriptation also has spread its gospel though the Hollywood guilds and various other industry organizations, putting on educational webinars and giving on-set presentations. Last year, the company launched a Brand Ambassador Program with 40 entertainment professionals and partnered with Green Rider, a U.K.-based movement pushing for sustainability on sets.

The Green Rider campaign was co-founded by actor-writer Danusia Samal (The Great) and is an agreement — largely focused around travel, energy, waste (where Scriptation comes into play), food and storytelling — “that’s sent to production when the job is offered or as part of the deal process,” Samal explains. It’s not an official contract but more of an approach of using talents’ leverage to make sustainable changes on set. Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bella Ramsey and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy are among the stars who have signed on, and the Green Rider is eying an expansion to the U.S. soon after discovering a way to more solidly lock in sustainable commitments.

Despite the improvement over the past decade, though, it’s been a challenge to fully rid Hollywood of paper.

“Anyone outside of [the industry] will be like, ‘Why are we still using paper scripts?’ But it is pretty common, and that is honestly our biggest competitor — paper,” Vitolo says. “It’s the way it’s been done, and the industry is a little slow to evolve. We’re [visiting] kids shows, and the kids have paper scripts; it’s like, ‘But they’re the ones on their phones all day!’ ”

In 2022, Scriptation launched a pledge — with several major stars and directors on board — to get Hollywood paperless by 2030, and its founder is confident the industry can get there, though he sees some still using paper scripts “as a crutch” and resisting the push to learn a new technology.

“If people are set in their ways and their workflows, you don’t want to say, ‘You have to do this,’ because that’s also bad. It’s like, ‘Here are all the reasons why you should do this,” and you just have to make them feel like that is the obvious choice,” Vitolo says of his approach. “It’s still a battle trying to get people away from their scripts that they hold on to dearly. But we’re working on it — and I’m not against shaming them.”

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Sustainability Issue. Click here to read more.

The fires that destroyed his family’s Pacific Palisades home were still burning when Ross Greenberg and his wife made up their minds: They were going to rebuild.
 
Yes, there were permitting challenges and headaches to soothe along the way, but quick decision-making and a year-plus-long hustle has placed them near the finish line on Iliff Street. “People are shocked when I tell them that we’re almost done,” the TV producer and co-founder of toy and board game IP company Perfect Game says on a recent afternoon over Zoom. “They can’t believe it. We’re getting a lot of, ‘What do you mean you’re almost done? How?’ We’ve worked really hard.”

“Hard” being the operative word. The work — done in collaboration with Lannen Construction and architect Kevin Oreck — placed an emphasis on sustainability, particularly the notion of “home hardening.” It’s a strategy of retrofitting or building a home using fire-resistant materials and construction techniques designed to protect properties from embers, heat or direct flames.

“I’m one of the first homeowners nearly complete, so we’ve been faced with so many first-mover problems, but we’ve been able to get it all done,” explains Greenberg of efforts that came after the Palisades and Eaton fires claimed nearly 7,000 homes in L.A. “I’ve basically had to become a mini expert on how to rebuild your home.”

He credits Lannen Construction’s Lee Horvitz — a former CAA agent who left the industry in 2016 to work first in real estate and then in construction — as a “linchpin” in his rebuild and Oreck (“who we absolutely love”) for guiding them through the process. Greenberg rolls through the measures they took to protect it from future wildfires: no vents or eves; permanent dehumidifiers in the attic; a Class A clay tile roof; an indoor sprinkler system; concrete masonry unit wall; drought-resistant landscaping; stucco exterior with no wood; noncombustible exterior gates; solar and battery features; electric appliances; double-paned, tempered glass windows; underground power lines and more.

“I believe that home hardening is the next evolution of sustainability and green building, because a large portion of Los Angeles is in high fire zones,” says Greenberg, whose résumé also includes tenures at Beyond Productions and All3Media America. “In our neighborhood, we never thought in a million years that we were going to lose our house — never. But since it happened, it forces you to really have to consider whether or not a fire could come back. Is it going to try to burn us down again? You have to put in these mitigating efforts, but they work hand in hand with the sustainability efforts. The purpose is really to make sure that your house can withstand whatever’s thrown its way.”

Greenberg likens it to making the home into a fortress without looking like one. “Our rebuild is beautiful and it looks like a normal house. You want to have all the comforts and conveniences of your last house. There are a just a few things that need to change,” says Greenberg, who is married to Danielle Amerian, an independent producer and writer who previously worked for Di Novi Pictures, Discovery Channel and John Goldwyn Productions.

Greenberg and his wife purchased their home in 2021, and it had been a journey from the jump. “It was actually a hoarder house,” Greenberg notes. “A woman had lived there for 27 years and it was filled floor-to-ceiling with boxes. Her parents’ remains were in a USPS box in the living room. It was crazy.”

And unhealthy. “Black mold, fungus, lead,” he added of the home’s dire state. “She really destroyed the place.” But Greenberg and his wife saw the potential and knew how difficult it was to find a prime spot in Pacific Palisades, so they went through with the purchase. They moved in May 2022 and immediately set about renovating and “ripping out all the bad stuff” inside the one-level, Spanish-style home built in the 1940s. They put in months of hard work and ended up loving it there.

When the fires broke out on Jan. 7, 2025, Greenberg was in Brentwood while his wife was at home. He managed to make it home in time to grab a couple of suitcases — a shared one for him and his wife, and another for their two children — and flee to his in-laws’ home nearby.

“We were glued to the TV all night,” Greenberg recalls. “I woke up the next day and turned on the news on NBC, and for a split second, I could see they were on my block.” He decided to race to his property and see what he could do as a last-ditch effort. He arrived to devastation. “As I got to our street, everything was on fire. House is completely gone. My car was in the driveway — gone. It was all rubble.”

Greenberg evidently leaned on his professional experience as a veteran producer and problem-solver and leapt into action rather that crumbling under his emotions. His first call was to his insurance company, and the second was to Horvitz, someone he had known for more than two decades from working in entertainment. He remembers Horvitz reassuring him by saying, “We’re going to take care of you,” and suggesting a first order of business: Hire an architect before demand skyrockets. After a series of calls, Greenberg tapped Oreck, and they got started despite the uncertainty in the air.

“We don’t know how long it’s going to take or how much money we will get from insurance or how it will all work out, but the decision was made,” he says, adding that they landed on it based on a variety of factors including their children’s school remaining safe nearby, having equity tied up in their home and wanting to stay in the Palisades. “We loved our house and didn’t really want to be anywhere else.”

The rebuild, a Spanish colonial revival-style home with a courtyard and separate studio house, is nearly complete with final inspections on the calendar. Then come utilities and power, followed by moving trucks, hopefully this summer. “The motivation from the first day has been for our family. We have kids and we want to get them home,” he says. “Our house is in a visible spot, and we’ve had people ask us about the progress when they’ve driven by. It gives our neighbors hope, almost like, ‘You can do it, too.’”

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Sustainability Issue. Click here to read more.