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Year 8 pupils at West Bridgford School look into their boiler converted to run on wood-fuel.

Nottinghamshire's Robin Hood territory of dense forests, also traditionally an area of coal mining, is now home to a radical programme to bring wood back as a sustainable fuel.

Schools across the County are getting a big carbon-cutting boost by converting their old boilers from coal to wood - a cleaner, more sustainable source of fuel. The Nottinghamshire County Council scheme is saving around 2,400 tonnes of CO₂ a year and catalysing a local wood pellet industry. Already 17 schools have benefited, with 27 more schools to be converted by the end of 2008.

With a clean, smoke-free environment, both teachers and pupils at the schools are enthusiastic about the Council's initiative, and even people living near the schools have noticed a reduction in local pollution. "When we burned coal it looked like the QE2 coming out of the docks! You used to get a layer of dust on all the cars outside" says John Flannigan, Site Manager at West Bridgford School, one of the participating schools.

The schools are also using their new wood-fuel boilers as a teaching resource to engage pupils in the move to sustainable energy.

The biomass push in the region has expanded the local supply and use of wood pellets and even created new jobs. The Council has teamed up with ReNU, a local non-profit company dedicated to supplying sustainable fuels, and until recently relying on imported pellets from Ireland. But early this year the company commissioned a local pellet production company to produce 10,000 tonnes of wood pellets a year from local forestry and sawmill waste. The Council also now uses boilers manufactured locally by Hoval and Ashwell which can run at efficiencies of over 90%.

Nottinghamshire County Council was the first in the UK to set up a Local Public Service Agreement, committing it to cut CO₂ emissions from council buildings by 25% or 3,500 tonnes a year. Their aim now is zero net emissions by 2050.