The green giant: GM's crossover plant in Delta Township

Out on the western edge of the Lansing metro, where Eaton County meets the freeway, sits a building big enough to lose a small town inside: roughly 3.4 million square feet of automobile plant under one roof. This is General Motors’ Lansing Delta Township Assembly, and when it opened in 2006 it carried a quiet first.

It was the first car factory anywhere to earn LEED Gold. That green-building rating usually goes to fussy office towers and college halls — not to a place that stamps steel and paints car bodies all day. The plant was built to sip energy and water, far less than an ordinary line uses. Daylight pours in. Storm runoff is captured. Waste gets cut wherever the engineers can manage it. A car plant that acts like an eco-building is a strange thing, and people noticed.

What rolls out the door is GM’s mid-size crossover lineup. These are the three-row family haulers that quietly became the best-selling shape in America. Over the years that has meant the Buick Enclave, the Chevrolet Traverse, and the GMC Acadia. A stamping plant next door presses much of the sheet metal that goes into them.

The plant matters to Eaton County the way a big mill once mattered to a river town. Thousands of people clock in here. GM has poured hundreds of millions of dollars back into the place to keep it current as the industry shifts from one kind of vehicle to the next. Drive past at a shift change and the parking lots tell the story. A tide of workers heads home, having spent the day turning flat steel into the SUVs that fill driveways from here to both coasts.