Brackenburn Ltd is an ethical social venture business established to produce biomass fuels derived from local sustainable resources, primarily bracken, and to market to domestic customers and public sector, agricultural and commercial users within the region.
Brackenburn Ltd is committed to providing local employment and, as far as possible, procuring all goods and services locally. Brackenburn intends to operate typically within a 50 mile radius of its base in the Mendip Hills in terms of sourcing raw material, production of biomass fuel and distribution of final product.
The Company is committed to minimising embodied energy and carbon in its products and services as far as is feasible.
Brackenburn Ltd has been established as a profitable social venture business. It was formally incorporated on 2008 with three founding Directors, namely Richard Geleit, Ian Reid and John Burton. Short biographies of each can be found below.
The founding Directors successfully obtaining a grant of £12,040 from the Sustainable Development Fund and allocated by Mendip AOND, matched (and more) by investment from the Directors providing approximately £30,000 to undertake a feasibility project set out in detail elsewhere on this website.
To underline our commitment to sustainability, we have been successful in setting up banking facilities with the Triodos Bank in Bristol. This is a highly specialist international Bank founded some 40 years ago in The Netherlands to support eco-friendly businesses. It has very strict rules about its customers and we are very pleased that Triodos found our local sustainability proposition compelling enough to take us on.
We have now produced bracken pellets in low volume to test for chemical analysis and burning performance in a variety of different pellet boilers. We have acquired a pellet boiler as a demonstration facility and this is now up and running providing heating and hot water for a large farmhouse. It is running side-by-side with a conventional oil-fired boiler to enable us to compare ease of use and maintenance and running costs over the long term. Future updates of this website will include data on this activity.
Once we have fully assessed and understood all our testing and analysis and our ability to produce high quality, high performance bracken biomass fuels in volume, we shall then enter into full production. Our intention is to commence with a substantial harvest this autumn (2009) in the knowledge that we will have mastered the production of bracken biomass fuels by this summer.
Moving into volume production will require considerably greater investment and we have already started the search for substantial grants and other sources of funding to turn our present research project into a profitable local sustainable business during 2010.
Richard has been a hotelier, fish farmer and restauranteur in Pembrokshire and Bristol. He and his family have lived in Blagdon for over 20 years.
Ian has been farming with his family in the Yeo Valley close to Butcombe for over 20 years and has lived in the area all his life. He has been harvesting bracken from the Mendip Hills for the past 5 years for use as organic compost.
John first moved to Blagdon as a teenager over 40 years ago and now lives with his family in Burrington. He has had a technical and marketing career that has taken him to 3 continents to work.