Gone are the days of a booming coal industry, where entire towns were beholden to the mines. It’s not entirely dead, of course — in the past few years there has been a slight uptick in coal employment as international demand has surged.
As a result, many people in central Appalachia have been looking for the next big industry that could create jobs and drive long-lasting economic growth. Based on their research, one policy group thinks the answer lies in green manufacturing.
The research from ReImagine Appalachia found that many Ohio Valley area counties already have more manufacturing jobs than the national average for making things out of wood, metal and plastic. Conversely, the region is weaker in products like textiles.
They believe this uniquely positions the region to be a leader in newer, greener manufacturing processes like creating plastics that are intended for multiple uses.
Researcher Bikash Gupta said knowing the region’s strengths and weaknesses can inform future manufacturing developments.
“It sort of signals a promise [because] it already has a foundation for green industry to sort of come in and thrive,” Gupta said.
Using proprietary data from the Brookings Institute, Gupta went county by county and compared the relative amount of manufacturing employment to the national average. Many Appalachian counties in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania surpassed the national average in per-capita manufacturing employment.
Amanda Woodrum, co-director of ReImagine Appalachia, said the organization holds listening sessions from groups all over the region and attempts to find common ground for policy changes.
One of the things community leaders widely agree on is the desire to attract high-paying jobs that don’t solely rely on the traditional, extractive industries like coal mining or logging.
“We’ll drive investment into manufacturing…[and] make sure that the future of it is cleaner and create equivalent jobs to the ones that environmental folks don’t want,” Woodrum said.
Woodrum says there may also be creative ways for companies to reuse some toxic mine byproducts like coal ash and acid mine drainage to make cement or batteries. As technology develops to make that happen, they hope it can alleviate lingering environmental problems while also creating jobs.
