Being Green

At Hand Theatre is striving for sustainability!  With the ever-increasing costs of producing theatre, we are making a concerted effort to change the way we present theatre – from the ground up.  We are thinking about our budgets and we’re thinking about global ethics. We have been uneasy contributing to the waste and disturbed by the amount of wood, hardware, paper and recyclable goods we’ve seen thrown away after each production we’ve worked on.  We want to feel good about the work we do as a company.

We have altered our mission to adopt a “greener” approach. Our productions will focus more on story and performance rather than the production elements surrounding them.  Our concerns are environmental, economic, and energetic. By using sustainable practices, we will reduce the amount of resources and materials we use, without sacrificing the environment or the high standards of our designers.

We reduce, reuse, recycle wherever we can, from daily operations to building our sets. Here are a few examples of how we’re living out our mission:

• We use vintage or re-used clothing in our costume designs
• We get the most use out of only the basic lighting plots in the theatres that we rent
• We get the most use out of only the basic sound equipment for each production
• We implement recycled / eco-friendly set materials in our productions
• We recycle all paper, bottles and cans in office and theatre facilities
• At Hand’s Playbill recycling program
• We print on 100% recycled content paper, and only when we really need to print (as we are a digital company)
• We paint with only nontoxic paint (100% low or no VOC) on all scenery
• At Hand is a member of Materials for the Arts, which provides recycled materials (paints, wood, fabrics, etc.) to non-profit companies to reuse, reducing the waste in our city’s landfills
• We buy goods and contract services from environmentally-friendly companies