Volkswagen builds eco-friendly car factory in Tennessee
Unlike the odometer, your car's ecological footprint starts well before you drive it off the lot. And while being gas-friendly on the road is great, there are many opportunities for an automobile to be green throughout it's lifetime.
The manufacturing plant is one.
With its new facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Volkswagenhopes to give a green start to the upcoming, and yet unnamed, mid-size sedans that will be made there.
Announced in July 2008, the $1 billion factory (still under construction) boasts it will fill 2,000 jobs, support 9,500 more, and save about 360,000 gallons of freshwater through a gray water system. Collection streams (right) throughout the site will collect rain water, which the company will use in its cooling operations and bathrooms.
The 6,000-acre property, previously an Army munitions plant, will feature nature trails. Volkswagen even plans to plant a tree for every one they removed during construction.
VW on the assembly plant's emissions:
Using the most efficient electric motors available for automated machinery, advanced laser welding technology, smart ventilation systems, improved air circulators and deflectors, air-to-air heat exchangers, continuous-line lighting system with T5 bulbs, and outside high pressure sodium vapor lights with mirror technology will save the annual energy use of 1,880 households.
The German car company also hopes the facility will cut emissions through how it paints the cars, its thermoplastic polyolefin roof, and its VOC- and CFC-free mineral rock wool panel walls.
Jim Motavalli, who took a tour of the plant, reports for Mother Nature Network:
But the coolest thing is what happens to waste paint. Only 80 percent of the paint actually makes it on the car, and the other 20 percent is normally diluted with 50,000 gallons of water per day. But in Chattanooga, the paint drops into dry limestone powder. Why? So it can be blended in, then sent to a cement kiln where it becomes, well, cement. Nil to the landfill.
There was a lot more of this kind of stuff — emu feathers clean dust off the cars. The white cypress wood shipping pallets are donated locally to make furniture and art projects.
The Chattanooga plant plans to begin production in 2011 on a possible 150,000 vehicles annually. Last month, American company General Motors announced 62 of its assembly, powertrain, and stamping facilities are now zero waste. Twenty-seven are within North America.
Images: Volkswagen
Via: MNN
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com