Mayors’ Green Manufacturing InitiativePhase I: “Making it Green”
Led by Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, the Mayors' Green Manufacturing Initiative is worked on efforts to make two Minnesota cities the center of green manufacturing.
“Making it Green” is an initiative of Mayor R.T. Rybak in Minneapolis and Mayor Christopher B. Coleman in Saint Paul with the Blue-Green Alliance, a national partnership of the Sierra Club and the United Steel Workers, based in the belief that investments in solving critical environ-mental challenges, such as global warming, represent strategic eco-nomic opportunities for the future. Its mission is to recommend policies and actions to position Minneapolis and Saint Paul as national leaders in promoting and developing green manufacturing technologies and products while creating family sup-porting jobs.
There is growth and opportunity in green manufacturing, especially in building products, renewable energy and transportation— green enterprise is an estimat-ed $229 billion market sector.1 The Natural Marketing Institute proj-ects that sales of green products of all kinds is “on track to jump (from$200) to $420 billion in just three years and then jump to $845 billion by 2015.”2 This report provides base-line information about these markets in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, best practices of other cities and a set of recommendations to guide the two cities. It calls for Minneapolis and Saint Paul to roll out a strategy to make increasing jobs, products and profits in green manufacturing a core element of their economic development plans.