Hi Eve;

I would have responded directly but our email program did not show your
personal email address.

Our operating budget is very tight and, for temporary exhibitions, is only
between $CA 100,000 and 120,000 annually, $80K of which goes into a major
exhibition which we mount every second year. The remaining 20-40K is used for
as many as 6 smaller exhibitions a year.

The smaller exhibitions are all less than 800 square feet and are primarily
two-dimensional, as we lack the wherewithal to do many more elaborate shows. At
present, we have an exhibition of the war art related to the Battle of Vimy
Ridge, which also includes the decorations of Lord Byng of Vimy, who commanded
the Canadian Corps in the battle and of Lt. Col John MacGregor, VC, who won the
first of his four high decorations for gallantry as a sergeant during the same
battle. In another gallery, we have an exhibition of children's war art from
the former Yugoslavia as well as a limited number of 3 dimensional artifacts
illustrating the Red Cross's role in war zones. The third, and smallest
exhibition, is one of work by Canadian war photographer Jeff Speed, depicting
the work of Canadian troops in Somalia.

There is VERY little that can be recycled from these exhibitions, other than
the odd case and backings for captions, but we do reuse these. Later this
fiscal year, we will replace the three small exhibition with three new ones,
all of which will be of war art. One of these, "Remembering the Holocaust" will
be a very hard-hitting exhibition of works on the Holocaust by Canadian war
artist Aba Bayefsky, who was present at the liberation of Belsen.

The main source of recycling materials comes from our single major exhibition.
Last spring we tore down "Victory!" which had dealt with the final days of the
Second World War, with particular emphasis on the liberation of the Netherlands
by 1st Canadian Army. We reused major partitions and a number of cases, or
components of cases, lights, a sound system, for a new exhibition we opened in
June, called "We'll Meet Again". It tells the stories of 24 Canadians and how
their personal relationships were affected by war. We also reused some of the
large photo blowups from Victory! to decorate a huge outdoor representation of
a wartime community hall, for the grand opening (and it WAS a blast!) of We'll
Meet Again. We'll use them yet again in education programs.

We don't have any written policy on recycling, but all our staff know that a
penny saved is a penny earned and we apply the recycling principle to
EVERYTHING we do. This summer, we had a major exhibition on the courtyard
provided by the Canadian Forces. It attracted more than 100,000 visitors. We're
today moving all the filled sandbags to an outdoor storage location and we'll
reuse them next year.

Hope this is helpful,

Harry Needham
Director, Programmes & Operations,
Canadian War Museum