With the St. Paul Ford plant scheduled to close next year,
the Twin Cities heavy-manufacturing base could shrink to near-oblivion. But last
winter, the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul announced plans to build a new
manufacturing base—turning “green” technologies into products. Directing the
cities’ efforts is David Foster, executive director of the Blue/Green Alliance,
a Minneapolis-based organization created by the Sierra Club and the United
Steelworkers union. The alliance is gathering information for a preliminary
report to be delivered in early 2008. While it’s too early now to say precisely
how the cities will grow green plants, Foster offers some thoughts.
Where the opportunities are
Manufacturing of renewable energy equipment, fuel-efficient and mass-transportation products, and building products that go into green or energy-efficient buildings. There are a whole lot of products that go into making buildings more energy efficient, from new kinds of glass to new heating, from ventilating and air conditioning systems to insulating products. We see all three of these areas . . . as very big job-creating opportunities, and opportunities that are connected with the technologies of the future instead of the technologies of the past.
What other cities are doing
I’m not aware of anybody who’s doing something specifically focused on green manufacturing. Toronto has an initiative to try to make itself the greenest city in the world. New York City has a very ambitious plan called NYPLAN [that’s] focused on livability issues, which include the creation of jobs associated with better mass transportation, less congestion, energy efficiency. But it’s not focused specifically on trying to capture the manufacturing jobs associated with these new technologies. So I think Minneapolis and St. Paul have an opportunity to be on the absolute cutting edge in terms of focusing on the manufacturing side of the efforts to deal with some of our big, complex, environmental issues, like global warming.
What a green manufacturer looks like
LM Glasfiber, a North Dakota company that manufactures fiberglass wind turbine blades, has grown over the last decade as this industry has grown, from 50 employees to 900. I think that’s the exact kind of company that we want in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The “new” environmentalism
People have thought of environmental issues in the framework of these being costs, and the solutions involving sacrifice. I think we’ve looked at this in precisely the wrong direction. We really ought to be looking at these big environmental problems, like global warming, from the point of view of opportunity, and that these are strategic advantages that businesses in particular can get if they decide to be part of the major solutions. If we look at it from that point of view, I think our two cities, our region, can come out of this as significant economic winners.
