When the plastics manufacturing plant Roger Binegar had worked in for 28 years closed in 2009, it felt like manufacturing in south-western Ohio had all but been consigned to history.
Yet 14 years later, a huge new construction effort is under way a stone’s throw from his home outside Jeffersonville. The Japanese carmaker Honda and the electronics company LG are building a battery manufacturing plant slated to employ 2,000 people once it’s up and running in 2026.
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Honda has committed to selling only electric vehicles in its major markets by 2040 and sees Ohio – where it employs more than 15,000 people across five plants – as its US hub.
Despite Binegar’s concern that traffic is likely to increase, on the whole, he believes it’s a positive move for the local economy. “I’d like to see it stay corn or bean fields, but it’s been zoned for industrial use for years,” he said.
“I understand it’s progress. People got to work. You got to have jobs to live.”
The new battery plant represents a new shift to reimagine the US’s long-suffering industrial heartland from the Rust belt to “Silicon Heartland”.
An hour’s drive north in New Albany, Ohio, Intel is building a $20bn semiconductor manufacturing plant while $100bn is expected to be spent on another chip factory in Syracuse, New York. In Indiana, thousands of acres of farmland are being converted into technology parks.
The 2022 Chips Act will see around $280bn poured into the US economy through grants, tax breaks and research incentives in a bid to reshore the making of essential technologies such as semiconductors.
“One advantage of having big companies return to the midwest is that it helps take seriously some of the crises around geopolitical tensions, climate change or potential disruption to our supply chains,” the Brookings Institution fellow Annelies Goger said. “It would help us have more capacity domestically to overcome those types of shocks in the future.”
But dreams of economic revival aren’t working out for all.
To huge fanfare in 2018, the then governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, turned the sod on the site of a new steel mill outside Ashland, a community in his state of 20,000 people that for decades had been racked by unemployment and outward migration. The brainchild of Braidy Industries (later Unity Aluminum), the project was pitched as the world’s largest low-carbon, rolled aluminum producer, as well as the first new greenfield aluminum mill to be constructed in the US for 37 years.
The $1.6bn factory was to create 600 jobs and pay workers double the local average wage. Kentucky chipped in $15m in state taxpayers’ money to help get the project moving forward. Rusal, the Russian aluminum giant, committed $200m in return for a 40% stake. The news was a huge boost to Ashland, which has a century-long history of steel manufacturing.