Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Shhhh Salvage Makes Dumpster Diving Fashionable
NYTimes.com: "To fight the waste, Ms. Clancy set up a business last year called Shhhh Salvage (www.shhhh-projects.com). It is a nimble, one-woman hub: through a network of contacts with people who work on shows, Ms. Clancy finds out when sets will be struck, then puts the word out to artists who can use stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill. She gets the discards, then sells them for a fraction of their value."
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8 comments:
This is not the first time I've heard of theaters saving materials after the show ending, and I approve of this idea. Theater is one of the most wasteful industries, and we should be doing what we can to diminish this waste.
This is an absolutely brilliant idea. There is such much perfectly good product that is thrown away because there's no place to store it or that group will never use it again. My favorite thing about this project is that it allows companies who don't have such a large budget to get access to perfectly good material. I wonder too if there is a way to recycle these materials into other industries as well. Although the building codes probably restrict this these materials could be used for all kinds of small temporary shelters or other things like that. The only bummer about this group is that it's so far away :-(
In a world that is making an attempt to make itself "green", this is a great step in the right direction. In what is possibly one of the most wasteful industries, this is a great way to re-use perfectly good materials. However, as Michael said, this kind of material cannot be used for extremely stressed structures, because of the possible question of structural integrity.
This is a good idea and hopefully could inspire others across the nation. No matter where youre working, it seems that not having money to buy that last sheet of plywood can sometimes be problematic. It's nice to have another cool resource.
This makes a lot of sense. Producing orgs don't have much incentive to reduce waste in the big picture, and to do it well would probably require a whole new department, but if an outside company can get good at salvaging what's worth it, it might be better on the environment and on the budget.
Too bad we can't dumpster dive for time or working professionals!! I agree --- we are so incredibly wasteful and if one man's trash is another man's treasure, we could build entire shows from the contents of a dumpster.
I think this is a fantastic idea. We had spoken about it a while back with shows donating their sets to warehouse spaces that they could then be claimed from. I think this is almost a better direction because it eliminates the concerns about copyright of intellectual property. By stripping down the sets to their bare materials, this simply becomes the "construction junction" of the theatre industry.
It always kill me when I see how much gets thrown out after a show, and I'm glad that there are people who are so dedicated to salvaging set pieces that could be immediately useful to somebody else.
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