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ANNUAL SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2025/2026

Welcome to our 2026 Annual Sustainability Report. At Birmingham Hippodrome, we believe culture has an important part to play in the fight against climate change, and we want to contribute to creating positive transformation. Alongside our environmental work driven by the ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard, we are following Theatre Green Book advice and aim to meet Basic standard across all areas in 2027. To help us reach this target, we're in the process of implementing the 65 goals we set in our 2025 Theatre Green Book Preliminary Plan.

This year, 49% of our audience said we've demonstrated a clear commitment to environmental responsibility. This is a 2% improvement on 2024/2025. Through this report, we want to inform our audiences, participants, and creatives how we are acting responsibly and invite you to be part of the change we're creating on and offstage.

THEATRE GREEN BOOK STRATEGY Theatre Green Book (TGB) provides industry-specific guidance on sustainable theatre, divided into three areas: Productions, Operations, Buildings. There are four tiers of achievement. Across 2025-2026, we reached important milestones in our sustainability strategy work, including: Introducing food waste and reforming our waste streams in line with Simpler Recycling legislation to reduce general waste volume by 43% in a year Running our second Staff Sustainability Survey and publishing the results in a report Presenting to industry peers, including at MAC’s Culture Shift Symposium 2025 and during Theatre Green Book’s Operations webinar series Running our 2025 All Staff Day to TGB Advanced standard for the second year Piloting an industry-first sustainable audience travel project (EnRoute) Steering conversations about sustainability and theatre by running wraparound events for Hot Mess, our climate-centred musical.

We sit on the Theatre Green Book Focus Group and Touring Committee to share learnings and make sure we're on the forefront of industry change. We certified to TGB Preliminary standard in July 2025 and have since made meaningful strides towards achieving TGB Basic. Our Theatre Green Book Preliminary Plan which outlines our next steps in more detail can be viewed here.

TGB PRODUCTIONS: PRELIMINARY PRODUCED SHOWS Our New Musicals team had a busy year, with the second instalment of our My First Musicals series, No Such Thing as Wolves, multiple workshops (developing shows including Mona Loser) and events (such as BEAM conference) taking place at Birmingham Hippodrome. Beyond Birmingham, our new musical Hot Mess (produced in association with Vicky Graham Productions) took Edinburgh Fringe by storm – selling out and garnering multiple awards including The Scotsman's Fringe First Award and the Popcorn Writing Award – before transferring to London for a run at Southwark Playhouse in October. No Such Thing as Wolves delighted family audiences in our Patrick Studio with fantastic musical numbers and memorable characters. The story had a strong ecological message about preserving natural habitats, which was reflected in our stage design - keen-eyed audience members may have spotted real tree branches decorating the back of the set. We salvaged the branches with the help of the Kingsbury Water Park rangers, who were cutting them down for safety. The show was also lit with lower impact as we upgraded Patrick Studio rig to be mostly LED in 2025. Sustainability efforts continued off-stage, with a pre-show craft activity for children using old sheet music from rehearsals and PVC-free vinyls chosen for window advertising.

Our new musical Hot Mess journeys through the ups and downs of our relationship with the planet, in the form of a rom-com musical placing Earth and Humanity as the couple at the heart of the story. To back up the production's environmental theme with real action, we built the show's set by repurposing wood from creatives Jack Godfrey and Ellie Cootes' previous show, 42 Balloons. The same set was used across the Birmingham Hippodrome previews, Edinburgh Fringe and Southwark Playhouse London performances, and some of the wood has been repurposed again for an enlarged set at the show's second London run at The Other Palace.

04 To extend the show's sustainability impact, Birmingham Hippodrome ran wraparound events in Edinburgh and London. We brought together theatremakers across the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a coffee morning to connect innovators and spark conversations. In Southwark, we convened a post-show panel to discuss climate, art, and activism, inspiring our audiences to take action for the planet in their everyday lives. The panel featured Karen Edwards (Travel and

Sustainability Writer), Tori Tsui (Climate Campaigner), Greg Cochrane (Culture and Climate Journalist), and the writers of Hot Mess, Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote. In Summer 2026, Hot Mess transferred to The Other Palace in London for 12 weeks. For this run we've staged another series of wraparound events in collaboration with Pollinate, who are developing new climate musicals. Event topics include song-writing, sustainable theatre, and real-world responses to climate change.

FESTIVALS During 2025-26 we strengthened our approach to environmental sustainability in festivals by embedding Theatre Green Book production tracking across all projects.

The total emissions from Hippodrome Festivals & Sites activity in 2025-26 was 592.6 tonnes CO₂e. This is the emissions equivalent of driving a petrol car 1,369,024 miles. Close to 99% of these emissions stem from audience travel, but we’re nonetheless working to reduce emissions under our direct control. This year we’ve significantly improved the methodology and conversion factors we use to track our impact by using a model incorporating Julie’s Bicycle and Theatre Green Book’s tracking tools. This means the tracked carbon emissions are higher than last year, because we’re recording more of our

FESTIVAL

impact. Rather than simply measuring overall carbon emissions, the expanded tracking provides much greater insight into where emissions occur across the lifecycle of our festivals, enabling more informed decisions. Building on our use of Julie's Bicycle Creative Climate Tools, every festival now tracks key areas including travel, freight, materials, waste and resource use throughout the planning and delivery process. As for the programme itself, we now monitor the sourcing, reuse and end-of-life of materials against recognised industry standards, supporting a circular approach to production and reducing unnecessary waste.

This year, an average of 96.5% of materials used to build our festivals ended up reused or recycled!

TONNES CO2 EQUIVALENT

Birmingham Weekender 2025

297.4

B-SIDE Hip Hop Festival 2025

157.4

Chinese New Year 2026

137.8

SUSTAINABILITY SUCCESS STORIES: ENROUTE PILOT To encourage our audiences to travel to us via public transport or active travel over the festive season, we worked with our travel assistant provider You.Smart.Thing. to offer exclusive content to ticketholders using more sustainable transit. By planning a journey on our website using public transport and signing up for live travel updates, audience members could access an online booklet with exclusive behind the scenes content and articles about the event they were attending By incentivising our visitors to travel to us without using a private vehicle, we hoped to demonstrate the great links to public transport that are available at the Hippodrome and encourage visitors to explore sustainable alternatives. We are hoping to trial more ways to incentivise sustainable audience behaviour in the future. Funding for the pilot project was provided by Innovate UK.

TGB OPERATIONS: PRELIMINARY We've been working hard to provide our visitors with high-quality food and drink options while reducing the impact of our catering. We've begun to remove unnecessary single-use packaging (for example, by switching from individual milk portions to refillable flasks) with the ultimate goal of eliminating all single use plastic packaging.

In our backstage Green Room, many readymade food options now come with carbon impact information on the pack to guide staff in making informed choices. In The Circle Lounge, English wine from Staffordshire is now available as a local, low-carbon option.

We've even created a custom beer to go alongside our range of popular brands – Attic x Hippodrome Show Off Session IPA! It's produced just for us at Attic Brew Co in Stirchley, Birmingham.

We ran a series of successful internal environment campaigns this year, including our TGB Preliminary Plan and launch video, our first Annual Sustainability Report, and a news item for Zero Waste Week. We have been tracking our gas, electricity and waste carbon footprint, as well as the proportion of waste recycled or diverted from landfill. Going forwards into 2026/7, we will also be tracking our water usage, so we can better understand (and ultimately reduce) our impact. We have introduced a new system for recording our business travel to help us towards understanding the full impact of our operations. Our Sustainability Champions began work on a deliveries plan to consolidate and reduce deliveries across departments. You can learn more about our travel impact and initiatives later in this report on pages 13-14.

SUSTAINABILITY SUCCESS STORIES: GREAT BIG GREEN WEEK In June 2025, we joined thousands across the UK celebrating Great Big Green Week through two largescale activities to creatively engage staff with the environment. After requests from staff for green spaces that were easy to access on breaks and for wellbeing activities, we purchased plants, pots, and tools to create three gardens across the theatre. We assembled these microgardens over three lunchtimes in different spaces across the building and invited all staff to get involved with planting. Since then, our employee gardening club has taken care of the spaces to keep them as havens for staff to enjoy at work. We even attracted some caterpillars!

We also ran a Clothes Swap for staff to encourage them to find an alternative to throwing out unused garments. Staff from the Hippodrome, Fabric and Birmingham Royal Ballet dropped off items they no longer wore. We then ran a swap shop for them to browse the donations and take ‘new’ items home with them. At the end of the day, the leftover items were donated to a local homeless shelter.

TGB BUILDING: PRELIMINARY Several essential upgrades have taken place in the theatre this year which will lower our longterm environmental impact. Refurbishing our front of house lifts has reduced their energy consumption and makes us more accessible to all visitors, supporting social sustainability. We replaced two end-of-life gas boilers with new models which are at least 30% more efficient. This means they consume less gas to produce the same amount of heating, which lowers our carbon emissions.

In 2025, we undertook a capital investment project to replace the majority of the tungsten lamps in the Patrick Studio with LEDs. 41 new LED lights were chosen, each saving between 1/3 and 6/7 of the energy consumed by the old lamps (depending on the model).

For 2025/26, the carbon impact of our gas usage was 458 tonnes CO2e and electricity was 529 tonnes CO2e. A demo of the new Patrick Studio LEDs for the Sustainability Champions.

RECYCLING ON THE Achievements after a year RISE of simpler recycling In 2025 we introduced food waste to the theatre as a new waste stream. To give our people and visitors the necessary information to use the new bin system, we created a sitewide campaign: Tricky Trash. By reminding users what can go in each bin, we increased our volume of food waste and recycling while reducing the amount of general waste we produce.

Since April 2025, our average monthly volume of recycling has increased more than 5x and average general waste has decreased by 43%. We created Tricky Trash posters and placed them next to bins to help people in the moment of deciding how to sort their rubbish, especially visitors who aren’t familiar with our waste streams. We shared information about the impact of correctly sorting waste through the staff newsletter and we even ran a highly competitive waste sorting game called “Trash Toss” at our All Staff Day:

In just one year, we reduced general waste to only 33% of our total refuse, down from 69% at the start of the year. We took a three-pronged approach to achieve these incredible results – posters, supporting information, and better bins facilities.

Simultaneously, we invested in our bin infrastructure to ensure all waste streams were available across our site, replacing out-dated labels and lids that didn’t fit to ensure bins were as easy to use as possible. Though this had an upfront cost, the results clearly show that it has worked very effectively and waste continues to trend towards better sorting and less unnecessary general waste.

09 Part of this huge success can be attributed to not just shifting the waste we produced to recycling or reusing streams, but to the effort we put in to stop items from ending up in the bin in the first place. We have got better at offering unneeded but perfectly good items to other local arts organisations.

For example, this year we: Gave a microphone to The Old Print Works and cameras to the MAC, who will use them in their children’s filmmaking classes. Partnered with British Heart Foundation to donate our unclaimed lost property to their shops. Gave donation points previously used by our fundraising team to The Old Print Works in Balsall Heath to take donations for their activities. Cleared out unused photo backdrops from previous shows and sent them to our uniform supplier, Corporate Connection, for secure recycling into insulation products and energy pellets.

These one-off and ongoing opportunities have allowed us to divert a significant amount from ever ending up in the waste. This avoids emissions associated with the disposal of these items, thereby benefitting the planet.

Our data backs up the claim that we’re throwing less away – in 5 out of the 6 months from January to June 2026, the total weight of all waste streams was lower than the same month in the year before. We are very proud of the positive impact we’ve had on the environment by getting our recycling and reuse streams into better shape this year. We’re thrilled that our data shows that our trend away from producing lots of general waste is continuing into 2026/27 and will be looking for more opportunities to make a difference this upcoming year.

OUR TEN COMMITMENTS TO CHANGE Our Theatre Green Book Preliminary Plan centres on Ten Commitments to sustainability across the scope of our organisation. For each of these commitment statements we have created actions and targets which will move us towards our goals. Here’s a summary of our progress in each area during 2025/26: 1. Data: We will capture and publish information on our greenhouse gas emissions to track our progress against set targets. This year, we had our submeters checked to ensure they’re providing us with accurate data. Now we’re able to monitor how much energy it takes to power shows in our main house and studio space, and can look to reduce usage in these high-demand areas long term. We diversified the data we gather on travel by our staff and audiences to better understand and estimate this large part of our Scope 3 impact. Our Staff Sustainability Survey continues to provide current insights into staff priorities for sustainability and the results show a year-on-year increase in confidence in our impact.

89% of our people say that Birmingham Hippodrome has a strong commitment to sustainability and improving the environment. 2. Resource: We will ensure sustainability is a key consideration in our procurement and implement procedures to encourage our staff and contractors to reduce, reuse, and recycle wherever possible. We have included sustainability information requirements in several tenders this year. Mixed recycling rates have risen to an average of 10% of all waste, while food waste now accounts for 14% and glass recycling a massive 45%. We’ve consolidated ordering processes for some goods (like stationery) to ensure we aren’t overordering, reducing unnecessary delivery miles and unused products. We are developing a new induction system to better educate contractors arriving on site about environment, health & safety and other key concerns, helping ensure all building users understand how to avoid resource waste.

11 3. Digital: We will assess and adapt our digital processes to improve efficiency and reduce our digital emissions. We have added an automatic time-out function to our till screens so that they go to sleep when not being used to save energy. The sustainability of provider companies and their services was assessed during a large tender process for our telecoms system. Our Marketing team reviewed our website and have deleted old webpages which we no longer need to reduce the energy and memory it consumes. 4. Training: We will upskill our staff, empowering them to make sustainable choices in their work and encouraging innovation for the environment throughout our business activity. We provided specialised learning and development opportunities to our Sustainability Champions committee members, including a screening of Climate Change: The Facts and attending MAC’s Culture Shift symposium – a sustainability-oriented conference for West Midlands arts organisations. Our Strategic Projects Officer has undertaken the ISEP Practitioner course; this training equips us with detailed knowledge of carbon reporting methods, impact assessment, and leading behaviour change for climate action, among a wide range of other topics. 5. Operations: We will monitor our building’s impact on the environment and start to reduce this through transformative capital works. We created a new internal system for reporting environmental issues and opportunities for improvement around the theatre. We used the TGB Building Survey Tool to undertake a high-level assessment of opportunities and risks for the environment on our site. Close to 40% of meal options in our backstage Green Room café are vegetarian or vegan, and in our audience restaurant, The Circle Lounge, 50% of mains and starters are vegetarian or vegan. This puts us significantly above TGB Basic standards for food and beverage provision.

For Robin Hood, we switched the majority of our confetti to a biodegradable paper-based alternative - avoiding over 500kg of single use plastic and local pollution. 6. Communication: We will communicate with our staff, visitors, and external stakeholders about our actions to support sustainability. We regularly update staff about sustainability at the Hippodrome and how they can be involved through digital (staff newsletter, intranet) and physical (posters, information signs) channels. We’ve found that using LinkedIn to announce strategic updates has been effective for keeping the industry up to date with our environmental initiatives. Sending staff to speak at arts events like MAC’s Culture Shift has also provided us with a platform to share resources and work in partnership with other cultural organisations.

12 7. Visitors: We will encourage our visitors to make sustainable choices while engaging with our programme in our venue and beyond. Our programmes and front of house screens supported our sustainability messaging, giving audiences an insight into how we’re Going Green. This includes suggested actions which visitors can take at the theatre to help us lower our environmental impact, which helps audiences feel involved in our climate action. A summary of our Hippodrome Tomorrow strategic sustainability work was included in our Annual Report. We are encouraging sustainable audience travel to improve our Scope 3 impact - see the travel section for further information. 8. Creative programme: We will measure the carbon impact of our in-house productions and festivals using trackers such as Theatre Green Book or Julie’s Bicycle, and make steps towards curating a varied programme which responds to the challenges and opportunities of the climate crisis. We have updated our production contracts to include new clauses setting out our environmental expectations for visiting companies. This means producers are required to respect our environmental policies, sustainably manage waste, and flag any elements of the show which might have a negative impact on the environment. TGB Tracking is underway for our produced shows, Hot Mess and No Such Thing as Wolves. 9. Partnerships: We will connect with arts organisations, local government, and others (such as community groups) responding to the climate crisis to offer mutual support and share best practice. By working with touring companies, we’ve created some huge environmental wins this year. When the National Theatre’s Dear England finished their UK tour at the Hippodrome, we helped them sustainably dispose of used costume items through donation and recycling. We’ve started to have regular forums with our building partners (including Birmingham Royal Ballet, FABRIC, and OneDance UK) which include discussion of environmental updates and strategies for being more sustainable in our building. We co-organise the Sustainable Arts West Midlands (SAWM) network with the Midlands Art Centre, increasing communication and engagement between arts organisations across the region. 10. Governance and Values: We will drive forward our organisational values through our leadership and embed sustainability into our governance structures, ensuring that the environment is considered in our key decision-making processes and all staff uphold these commitments. In August, we issued a new environmental policy statement which sets out organisation-wide intentions for our impact on the environment. The updated statement ties together our 10 Commitments with our ISO 14001 and TGB work into one cohesive policy serving all stakeholders. We conducted our annual audit of our environment management system by an appointed external auditor and received positive feedback as well as opportunities for improvement, many of which we have now resolved or progressed to lower our impact. We are completing the recommendations and actions from our most recent ISO 14001: 2015 audit. In our 2026 Staff Sustainability Survey, a remarkable 87% of employees reported that sustainability is reflected in their work. This shows that staff are playing a large part in driving forward sustainable change in line with our values and governance.

TRAVEL Our fantastic programme attracts audiences from all over the UK, which means travel to our venue continues to be one of our highest emissions areas. This section breaks down where that impact originates and how we have tried to reduce it. Public Transport

Car (Petrol / Diesel)

Car (Electric / Hybrid)

Walking

Cycling

70% 65% 60%

50%

52%

50%

40% 34% 30%

20%

30%

22%

10%

10% 5%

Hippodrome Staff 2025/26

1% Show Audiences 2025/26*

Festival Attendees 2025/26 * 9% of visitors answered ‘other’ Audience data from Indigo

Staff Commuting 187 tonnes CO2e in 2025/26 We calculated this using data reported in the Staff Sustainability Survey 2026. This is a rough approximation taken from a limited sample of our staff, meant to help us see trends over time and indicate the significance of commuting to our overall emissions. The total emissions estimate is lower this year compared to 2024/25, which aligns with the shift we’ve observed towards public transport for our employee’s commutes. While travel is necessary to the way our organisation functions, it’s important we work

on programmes to reduce its greenhouse gas impact. This year we were pleased to partner with WMCA to offer 4 weeks of free bus travel plus ongoing discounts to our people. 53 employees redeemed these offers to collectively make 1,479 journeys – a significant saving for both the environment and our employees. Almost 2/3 of staff commutes were made using public transport this year, demonstrating that lower-carbon commuting continues to rise in popularity. Combustion engine car use remained similar to last year, but lower than our audiences for festivals and theatre. Note: This is an estimate based on sample data in Staff Sustainability Survey 2026. Staff numbers as of 31st March 2026.

Business Travel 21.9 tonnes CO2e in 2025/26 We made a significant update to our Travel Policy in 2025 to support sustainable business travel. The policy now encourages staff to prioritise ‘slow travel’ (meaning trains, coaches, and ferries) where possible and especially when travelling internationally on behalf of Birmingham Hippodrome. We hope our employees will take up this opportunity to avoid flying for short trips, as flying produces up to 20x more GHG emissions per passenger than international trains. This year we recorded the emissions of our business travel for the first time. Each department was provided with a spreadsheet based on the Theatre Green Book travel calculator to record all journeys made by their staff for work. The combined emissions across all departments were recorded in the KPI report every quarter.

Increasing our number of group bookings will likely improve our transport emissions as groups tend to travel together on more efficient vehicles like coaches. This year we received 3,491 group bookings.

Festival Travel Travel: 19.4 tonnes CO2e Deliveries: 6.2 tonnes CO2e Over 99% of emissions from our festivals are attributed to audience travel, indicating how great an affect audience's travel decisions can have on our impact. Travel by public transport increased from 43% to 52%, becoming the most common mode of transport. Car use fell in line with our theatre audiences, with petrol / diesel journeys decreasing from 40% to 34%. Active travel remains a less popular option since many of our visitors travel from further afield. Overall, the data aligns with our employee and theatre audience results to show a steady shift away from petrol and diesel cars towards public transport, making a big difference to our festival emissions.

Note: This is in addition to employee commuting.

Theatre Audiences Our audiences use significantly more public transport than the UK benchmark for theatre attendees, with 50% of Hippodrome audiences choosing public transport compared to the UK average of 35%. Trains remain the most popular transport method. However, the data indicates that audiences for our evening shows depend more on private vehicles to reach us – perhaps due to more limited public transport options available in the evenings. Over time, audiences are increasingly choosing to travel more sustainably: petrol / diesel cars have seen a 5% fall in use since last year while public transport has risen by 4%. As public transport provision improves over time, we hope this shift away from heavier-polluting cars will continue.

We encouraged festival attendees to plan their journeys to, from, and around the festivals using our online travel assistant, which highlights lower carbon and active travel routes. To enable sustainable travel for the 125,000+ Birmingham Weekender attendees, we worked with You.Smart.Thing. to build a custom map of the festival sites and stages on the travel planner to make this the easiest option for planning journeys and encourage lower impact travel. We also made information supporting active travel – like bicycle parking spots – easy to find by listing them in the festival travel information. Our festivals team adopting the Theatre Green Book travel tracker this year has enabled us to gather precise data on our emissions from festivals performers and staff travel, as well as deliveries made for the festivals.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS When we made Sustainable one of our organisational values in 2023, we knew we wanted to play a more active part in protecting our environment in Birmingham and beyond. By considering wholistically how we impact the environment and taking targeted action to reduce negative impacts, we are now rising to the challenge to be more sustainable. The arts have an important role to play both on stage and behind the scenes to enable our society to become more sustainable. Through changing the environmental conversation at Birmingham Hippodrome, we aim to strengthen the ripple of positive change for sustainability already underway in theatre.

We hope this report has assured you that we are taking our responsibility for the environment seriously and responding creatively. We will continue to seek ways to deepen our positive impact and increase our sustainability ambitions.

ANNUAL SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2025/26 Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre Trust Ltd Hurst Street, Southside, Birmingham BH 4TB

birminghamhippodrome.com/going-green Registered Charity No. 510842

We’d love to hear from you about sustainability – including what we’re doing well and how we could do even better. Get in touch by emailing us! environment@birminghamhippodrome.com