A Europe of clean, green cities and resurgent industry is a fantasy – unless we get really creative | Hans Larsson
“B“itterfeld, Bitterfeld, where the dirt falls from the sky”, went a popular saying. Located in the intensely industrialized Chemical Triangle of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Bitterfeld became the dirtiest city in Europe in the 1980s. Its chemical industry and lignite mines dumped toxic waste into waterways, and the air carried concentrated sulfur dioxide about 40 times current levels.
Europe would soon be shaken from its post-war dependence on heavy industry in favor of cheap imports from abroad. In the final days of the GDR, environmental activism delivered the final blow. The 1988 release of the undercover film Bitter Things from Bitterfeld highlighted the appalling living conditions in the Chemical Triangle, and the city’s chemical plants were quickly decommissioned.
Since then, the idea has become ingrained throughout Europe that the noise, dirt and smoke of heavy industry is an evolutionary stage to be overcome. Disused industrial districts and quays have been reinvented as cultural spaces, while tourists toast in urban squares that were once parking lots. Photogenic European cities regularly top global rankings for livability, and more than 40% of UNESCO World Heritage sites are located on the continent. Germany’s Chemical Triangle was reborn as Solar Valley in the early 2000s, enjoying a new lease of life as a photovoltaic hub that, for a time, produced world-leading solar cells.
Europe has banned much of its industry, but we continue to reap the rewards: globalized manufacturing chains provide us with cheap products that arrive in neat packages. And while our cities are beautified by good intentions, they are reduced to markets for the consumption of that beauty: streetscapes fill Instagram feeds, as surely as houses become Airbnbs. Meanwhile, the average resident, facing declining employment outside the tourism industry, is increasingly excluded from their own hometown. When heavy industry was offshored, so was its workforce.
Today, a dizzying amount of products consumed in Europe are manufactured elsewhere. China accounts for more than 80% of global solar energy production and the majority of global wind turbine installations as of 2023. At the same time, much of the vital digital infrastructure that enables productivity and leisure comes from the US West Coast. Bitterfeld’s Solar Valley is unfortunately going through a difficult period, with its start-ups being overwhelmed by subsidized competition from abroad. The reality today is that European “quality of life” has become a third-party subscription, fueled by mountains of coal in Xinjiang and power-hungry data centers in Virginia.
This creates worrying vulnerabilities for Europe, and the warning lights are flashing in the corridors of power. Since Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on European competitiveness, Brussels has been fighting anxiously to bring productivity back to the continent. The most important result is the Industrial Accelerator Act, which will set quotas for European-made components in public procurement and subsidies. Sensitive to environmental concerns as well as self-sufficiency, it aims to support sectors such as solar and wind power and battery production. Yet lawmakers are reluctant to force companies to source from specialist European suppliers, and there will be many difficulties over whether to approve “Made in Europe” or settle for “Made with Europe”.
Without sufficient scale to create efficiency and affordability, European reindustrialization will be nothing more than a vanity project. Let’s see how this emblem of sustainability, the solar panel, is made. Europe’s largest factory is located in Catania, Sicily: Enel’s 3SUN Gigafactory. The 24-hectare (60-acre) site recently opened to great fanfare and is capable of producing 3GW of capacity per year, which would power roughly a quarter of London’s buildings. The EU currently aims to produce 10 times this quantity: 30 GW of solar panels per year. Nine additional 3SUN-sized factories and the annual quota is reached.
The problem is that a solar panel factory itself is only the last and smallest link in the chain. A photovoltaic panel is mainly made of sand, which must be melted at extreme temperatures for a few days in order to produce polysilicon ingots. This is an energy-intensive process that now takes place on a ridiculously small scale in Europe. The ingots then need to be sliced, the slices cut into photovoltaic cells – we don’t do these things either – and the cells finally assembled onto panels.
To get an idea of the space and resources this requires, look at the JA Solar base in China, designed to assemble, sand to panel, around the EU’s annual target of 30 GW of solar capacity. It covers 172 hectares, seven times the size of Tango in Sicily and about half the size of central Amsterdam. It also requires a huge amount of energy, as nine-tenths of the energy in the solar value chain is used in the steps before panel assembly. Coal plays an important role in China’s electricity supply – 6,300 TWh per year, double the EU’s electricity production. It uses it to power 60% of its combined solar panel production. Where would this energy come from if Europe gave up coal?
So much for the solar panels. Similar chains reveal themselves when examining wind turbines, batteries, and GPUs. Behind any “made in Europe” product are mazes of mundane middlemen – whether it’s Russian fertilizer used for Spanish tomatoes, Middle Eastern plastics for German medical devices, or Chinese vitamin B1 to fortify cereals made in France. Our back room has a back room: it’s sprawling, massive, located almost entirely outside of Europe, and currently far dirtier than we’d like to admit.
Faced with a shortage of available land in Europe, reindustrialization would require new approaches to construction and some seriously creative thinking. Could the production of tomorrow be integrated in a new way into landscapes and even into our cities? What if a factory could move and shift to produce a product where and when it is needed? What if infrastructure also served as protective environments for flora and fauna? Could we redesign our technologies to work with the neglected resources around us, like the kinetic energy created by movement on roads and sidewalks? (Tourist attendance would take on new importance). There is enough need at this time to develop a significant invention.
Even assuming that new forms like these are feasible, the sheer scale of the industrial zones required would surely spoil many a postcard. But it is worth remembering that the heritage sites Europe enjoys today were often practical technical solutions meeting yesterday’s needs. The great Parisian boulevards of Georges-Eugène Haussmann organized transport and sanitation in an unsanitary medieval city; Venice’s canals were originally conduits for goods, as well as production lines for the ships that supported the Republic’s pre-eminence. Designing a contemporary industry closer to our means of subsistence could well generate real heritage.
Europe is beginning to grapple with the material arithmetic that underpins its way of life. Are we going to accept that livability is not only green, but also needs a significant amount of gray?
