Environmental Issues

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Our current policy on environmental issues is that we try to be as environmentally friendly as possible. The two main difficulties is that in most cases being environmentally friendly takes either time or money. As a volunteer run organisation with no external funding both are in short supply.

You can see from this page what we are doing and where your help could make a difference. In particular if you could volunteer some time or know of ways to be more environmentally friendly that will save time and or money we'd love to know!

To volunteer contact our Volunteer Co-ordinator, if you have something specific you wish to help with please let us know in your email.

Reduce

We are looking at our energy costs and we are assessing whether energy efficient light bulbs will make a difference (we think they will). We expect to change to these soon. Our main energy cost is for heating and until some major building projects complete it will not be possible to insulate the building well, meaning energy for heating will remain significant. However we do take on these tasks when we can. During Pump Art week we completed the refurbishment of the Upper Rehearsal Room, which had previously involved installing double glazing and roof insulation and part of the refurbishment of the Chrales Room included new insulation to all the outside walls.

Reuse

We are active members of Watford's WRAP project which supplies us with with much of the fabric we need for costumes and set for the Theatre Company productions (both adult and children and youth).

We also participate in other schemes for taking on furniture. Our theatre auditorium uses seats reclaimed from the National Theatre and we are hoping to take opportunities to source furniture for the other areas of the Centre.

During set build and get out we keep as much usable building materials as we can, all the large 'flats' are kept and reused and much of the remaining material is broken down into timber and stored.

Recycle

We do collect and organise our material for recycling however we do not recycle as much as we could as we do not have the volunteer force to make it happen. There is a need for volunteer help that could take our recyclable rubbish to local recycling centres on a regular basis. This is mostly bottles from the bars but does include some paper.

Periodically we clear out volumes of old timber that is not suitable for reuse in theatre sets. This could also be recycled if we had the manpower to make it happen. Help for this would be needed less frequently than glass and paper recycling, but would ideally involve the use of a van.

During major projects we seek to recycle more substantial items. As an example all the reclaimed metalwork from the auditorium refurbishment was recycled.

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