More than 15 years ago, city leaders launched an effort to promote Chattanooga as a “sustainable city.” Banners on light poles heralded the city’s plans to pursue a broad spectrum of eco-friendly practices – environmentally oriented building methods, improved energy efficiency and greater use of renewable and clean energy, recycling and broader use of recycled materials, and closed-loop industrial systems to eliminate waste and pollution in manufacturing at its source.
But just as city officials were becoming proficient in the language of sustainability and familiar with the varied practices to achieve it, a new mayor walked in and turned the city into another direction. The result: Chattanooga fell from the vanguard of the sustainability movement to the back echelons – ironically, just at the time that major corporations around the world were embracing sustainable production practices for both corporate and environmental responsibility, and for long-term economic savings, as well.
Sustainable and profitability
Chattanooga’s new sustainability office is trying to recover some of that last ground. Its Eco-Expo events this week should give it a shot in the arm. The event’s headline speaker Thursday, Volkswagen’s Dr. Gerhard Praetorious, the chief of VW’s international corporate efforts to improve sustainability and environmentally sensitive practices at VW’s plants in more than 20 countries, made clear why sustainable industrial practices are critical to the future and also have become the rising benchmark of industrial globalization.
Industries that want to excel, grow and maximize profits, he says, will simply have to hone the sustainability and efficiency of their manufacturing processes, and of the materials and resources they consume. That’s so, in part, because of diminishing natural resources amid the rising consumer and mobility demands of vast new populations in rising industrial powers across Asia, especially in China and India.