Rural Affairs Minister Alun Michael is opening a new £10m production line at Kingspan Insulation today (Thursday).

Herefordshire becomes home to one of the world's biggest and most successful manufacturing sites of its kind. The new production line makes the Kingspan Insulation site, at Shobdon Airfield Industrial Estate near Pembridge, the largest high performance insulation manufacturing site in the world.

Mr Michael, the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality, has agreed to perform the ceremony for the new state-of-the art line, at the culmination of the multi-million pound investment programme.

The company has expanded at a remarkable rate since first moving onto the former home of Torvale Building Products.

Turnover leapt by over 25% to £57.8m in 2002 and is expected to have achieved even greater heights when the figures for last year are published next month.

With such rapid expansion comes the recognition of the responsibility Kingspan Insulation carries towards the environment.

The company has recently been awarded the ISO 14001 Environment Management benchmark.

This recognises the determined efforts made to ensure that the operation at Pembridge and the company's manufacturing processes achieve substantial improvements for the local and global environment.

"This new production line represents another big leap forward for Kingspan Insulation. We have been able to create almost 300 new jobs here over three years," said marketing manager John Garbutt.