On Monday 23^rd August an exemplar Low Impact building was opened in the Wyre Forest by local ‘rock royalty' Robert Plant.

The building is the physical ‘flagship' to the Forestry Commission's ‘Grow With Wyre' Landscape Partnership which MEA have been significant partners in. Heating and hot water to the building will be provided by burning ‘a dozen or so trees' every year from the Commission's own surrounding estate in a modern high-tech automatically-fed wood chip fired boiler.

Over the past year both our Low Carbon Enterprise (LCE) and Low Carbon Communities teams have been undertaking respective wood fuel feasibility studies and householder energy efficiency workshops in the Wyre as part of the £1.8m Heritage Lottery funded project to restore and enhance the Wyre Forest landscape encompassing all sorts of aspects from nature conservation to archaeology to orchard planting and local produce marketing schemes. MEA played a key role in the development of the project proposal and also have an ongoing strategic role on the Technical Working Group for the ‘Re-Energise the Wyre' aspect of the programme which these two activities in particular, as well as the heating system and fuel supply for the new building itself have been funded under. The idea of incorporating the ‘low carbon' aspect of the project is to ensure that it is sustainable in the longer term and to recognise that creating a viable wood fuel market stimulated by local demand is one way of economically sustaining the forest landscape.

Tristan Haynes, Technical Adviser for the LCE team at MEA said "the opening was great to meet all the people involved in such diverse activity and to celebrate the opening of the new centre and all the activity going on around it with local celebrity Robert Plant and his ceremonial sawing of a branch. Whilst clearly genuinely impressed with the outcomes of the project as a whole and interested in the preservation of such a large area of important forest habitat in the area where he grew up he joked that the ceremonial act itself was "one of the sillier things I've been asked to do"!