Sustainability is one of Birmingham Hippodrome’s five organisational values and is a commitment in many areas of our past, current and future work. We are committed to making sure sustainability is at the forefront of our plan when putting on shows, organising events and festivals and within the day-to-day operations of the building and business.

As a theatre, our organisation has an impact on the local culture and community, we want this interaction to be as positive and transformative as possible. As part of our 5-year plan (2023-2028), we are committed to being ambitious in our actions. This means investing in sustainable practices to meet environmental responsibilities and making sure that the venue is fit for many years to come.

To demonstrate our commitment to sustainable production practices, we set the target of running our 2024 All Staff Day in September as a Theatre Green Book ‘Basic’ event. Our calculations now show that we astonishingly exceeded this target and hit the ‘Advanced’ level requirements by sourcing 89% of resources for the day sustainably and reusing 100% after the event was over.

What is the Theatre Green Book?

The Theatre Green Book (TGB) is a set of guidelines created by leading theatres, national theatre organisations (like ABTT and UK Theatre), and building experts, Buro Happold, to improve arts sustainability in three key areas – buildings, operations, and productions.

What does ‘Advanced’ level mean?

TGB’s guidance is split into four tiers of complexity – Preliminary, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced. Each tier requires you to be more sustainable, and especially to increase the percentage of the materials your event or production sources second-hand and reuses in the future. We aimed to meet the ‘Basic’ targets for the All Staff Meeting as this was our first time trying out their guidance, but we ended up hitting the ‘Advanced’ goals! ‘Advanced’ means that more than 75% of the resources we used had to be already owned or sourced from a renewable source (we scored 89%) and 80% of the All-Staff resources needed to have a second life (we scored 100%).

How have we done this?

The most important thing we did to reach these targets was to keep an accurate record of where we sourced everything used at the event – from the TVs we already owned and used in the breakout events to the tech we hired for the Patrick studio. This meant coordinating with everyone involved in planning and organising the All-Staff Day.

We also paid attention to resource requests and tried to reuse things we already own, or only buy new things that we know we’ll need again. For one-off items like paper print-outs, we made sure that if they weren’t reused, they were recycled.

Keep an eye on our blog and social media to stay up to date with our sustainability efforts and progress.