Minimizing Waste

[SBC]

The Theatre industry creates a large amount of waste in the name of making art. I am curious to learn how everyone else minimizes waste.

When cutting gel for a show I save the tissue paper, fold it just so and it take it home to use in giftwrapping.
I always keep the strip of gel that is leftover from cutting 7.5" & 6.25" frames. I encourage students to use them for labs, we use them to wrap around fluorescent tubes, and sometimes cut them immediately for strip lights.

Since I am a pretty good carpenter for a lighting guy I re-purposed a big pile of 3/4" plywood from a set. The shop was throwing it all away. I made a record cabinet and a tv stand.

We recycle cardboard in my venue. I always keep a few small and medium boxes in the attic for shipping items out.

We have a bin just for scrap metal. The sell price for scrap steel may not be high, but we get a few buck back and the metal stays out of the landfill.

 

[gafftaper]

The biggest waster in theater is the scenery department. If you are in a small educational theater or community theater with free labor building everything from wood you should be building everything from stock scenery pieces in standard sizes. Store them and reuse. If you need advice on how to convert to stock scenery get: The Stock Scenery Construction Handbook. You can reuse the same flats and platforms for decades. When flats get worn, replace the muslin and keep going. Platforms get too many holes in them, replace the offending part and keep going.

Larger theaters that weld their sets with a paid crew are the largest offender of all. There's very little that can be done to reuse because the labor costs of cutting everything back up in a way that can be reused is far too high. Even the cost of cutting things up so they can be sorted for recycle is high. Plus you would have a problem with ever diminishing steel tubing. The first show it would be all 8' sections, the second show it would be 7'9", the third show it would all be 7'6"... You could recycle a bit, but it's really hard.

 

[misterm]

my kids laugh at me for saving so much from set builds and how much we reuse scenery. but beyond eliminating waste, it saves us money!

 

[josh88]

I wish I had notes from it, but USITT had a panel this past year about greener theatre and what we can do to reduce our waste. There is a growing movement

 

[gafftapegreenia]

I think there is a line, a fine line, between adaptive reuse and being a hoarder. To play devils advocate for a moment: many theatres build very different sets from show to show, many theatres don't have space to store stock scenery or materials (or the budget to acquire said space), and many theatres don't have the funds to pay for the labor to first disassemble sets and then to organize and save said materials.

So, yeah, we can do a lot better to make what we do more green, but there is no magic bullet solution. I have walked into so many scenic shops full of old sets and props, saved because of the time and labor put into building them, but never touched again because they were never "quite right" for whatever designer they were presented to. The people in the shop are only one part of the Green equation.

Heres a great article from a recent TD&T: http://tdt.usitt.org/GetPDF.aspx?PDF=49-3sustainable

 

[josh88]

Here's a brief revival of this topic. I got a comp copy "a practical guide to greener theatre" by Ellen jones in the mail today. It looks like a ton of great information including the basics of recycling what you can in the shops to minimizing the chemicals used in painting and costume shop, and reducing waste in concessions and restrooms. It looks like it will be an interesting read and I'll get back to this once I finish it.


Via Tapatalk

 

[MichaelPHS]

When it comes to re-using and recycling, I am the king, as well as sorting out clutter. The day I started, I did a very "Doctor Who" thing and went through everything "junk, broken, worthless, hairdrier (no kidding, I actually found an old hairdrier)" as well as scrapped the damaged scenery materials. The amount of space I found to store stuff after that was phenominal, not to mention set pieces are so much lighter. The existing pieces were 1-2 inch thick ply, and weighed a ton. Now we have pine and hardboard flats (would use solid fronts due to being more kid resistant) which fold almost flat and weigh half what the others did and can be decorated accordingly. all our lamps, which before took up a whold cabinet) are now in storage tubs underneath the raised platform our lighting console is on, along with new gel, pre cut are in file-o-faxes under my desk. Not sure on the disposal route here as it all goes through the school's site team, but I presume it all ends up in the skip (the stuff I cleared I took to the local tip and sorted all the recycling from the junk) but I'm going to see what I can do to change that.