Light industry is less capital-intensive and more labor-intensive than heavy industry, often focused on manufacturing or servicing goods directly for retail consumers. It has a smaller environmental impact and can operate in smaller spaces. Compared to heavy industry, it requires minimal investment to start and is more stable for local economies.
Light industry, like heavy industry, has no clear definition. In most other respects, the two are not usually similar, but can often be better understood than each other. For example, light industry requires much less capital investment than heavy industry, is more labor intensive, and is more often focused on manufacturing or servicing goods directly for the retail consumer.
Goods manufactured or assembled by light industry facilities are often packaged for retail sale, leading to the conventional wisdom that it is more consumer oriented than heavy industry. In many cases, heavy industry facilities make components for other heavy industry operations. For example, the various components that make up motor vehicles, such as engines, tires, and window glass, are themselves manufactured in other facilities considered heavy industry operations. Many other heavy industry facilities produce goods such as railroad locomotives, tanks, and ocean liners that are generally not sold to the average consumer.
The environment is generally much less severely affected by light industry than by heavy industry, which includes among its applications such diverse polluting activities as oil refining, steel milling and mining. Most heavy industry operations also impose a giant footprint on the land, often occupying facilities spanning many acres. Many light industrial applications can set up shop in small spaces designed for general commercial use, often needing very little remodeling or retrofitting. Where light industry poses an environmental risk, such as a carpentry shop or metal plating operation, a minimum of specialized equipment is often sufficient to improve the impact.
Compared to heavy industry, most light industry operations require only minimal investment to get started and can soon begin producing goods or services that will generate revenue. A heavy industrial plant, in contrast, could take years from inception to actual operation, considering the obstacles posed by environmental issues alone. Technological advances could reduce environmental pressures, but the wide variety of problems involved in setting up a heavy industry plant almost guarantee that it will be a more complex, time consuming and expensive undertaking than setting up a light industrial operation.
Light industry is, in many cases, more labor intensive than heavy industry, but this is not a hard and fast rule. Old-tech heavy industries, such as textiles and automakers, typically employ thousands of people and dominate the local economies in which they operate. This domination of the economy by heavy industry has significant drawbacks: if a plant closes or even shuts down for a short period of time, the impact on local and regional economies is dramatic. By dispersing the same number of jobs among many small light industry employers, greater stability is introduced into an area’s economy.
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