Using a process called anaerobic digestion, the company takes wastes from food processors, farms and treatment facilities and uses them to produce biogas (60% methane), which can be supplied to natural gas utilities, used to generate electricity, or further processed as compressed natural gas.
Clusters Essential for Advanced Manufacturing
"If you create a mental map of what a strong manufacturing country looks like, it is not linear. It's clusters, economic teams that create energy, build on themselves and create new companies and new ideas," says Cliff Waldman, a senior economist with Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI). "To pursue an advanced manufacturing strategy as one of the tools for moving forward out of this difficult period, clusters are absolutely essential."
Clusters can be spurred because of a strong OEM presence. In Tennessee, for example, where Nissan (IW 1000/26) and Volkswagen (IW 1000/10) have major assembly plants, more than 860 auto suppliers and ancillary manufacturers have now located in the state.
Some argue that geographic proximity is unimportant in a global economy powered by the internet and next-day shipping. But in their new book, Producing Prosperity, Harvard professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih say such arguments neglect the value of the industrial commons, or "the set of manufacturing and technical capabilities that support innovation across a broad range of industries." By failing to protect these "delicate ecosystems," they stress, companies and industries can put themselves at a competitive disadvantage and risk their long-term viability.
Pisano and Shih point out that "distance matters" because it can be difficult to transmit some types of knowledge and capabilities over long distances.
"Important knowledge is still carried around in the heads of people and in informal (almost invisible) routines used by organizations," they write, noting that despite decades of other car companies trying to copy Toyota's production system, large differences in productivity among the automakers still exist. "It seems that there was important knowledge about the Toyota production system locked inside the heads of its employees that others couldn't access."
Pisano and Shih warn that the erosion of America's industrial commons could leave the U.S. with "a big problem on its hands." As an example, they point to the move of semiconductor production from the United States to Asia in the 1980s. That shift brought with it a host of related manufacturing capabilities, such as electronic-materials processing, deposition and coating. As a result, it established an industrial commons outside the U.S. "needed to produce a whole host of advanced, high-value-added electronic products such as flat-panel displays, solid-state lighting and solar PV."
