The partnership between the Renault-Nissan Alliance and Daimler reached a milestone today when state officials joined Nissan leaders to break ground on a new manufacturing facility in Decherd, Tennessee.

The new facility – located at the existing Nissan powertrain assembly complex – will produce Mercedes-Benz 4-cylinder gasoline engines for Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz models.

The Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) seeks to transform global gold production by integrating and formalizing the position of countless artisanal and small-scale miners. Executive director Lina Villa Córdoba talks to Jayne Flannery about ARM’s vision for the human face of the industry.

Exploration companies GTA Resources and Balmoral Resources have just announced an exciting set of drilling results for their Northshore Gold joint venture. Peter Clausi and Darin Wagner talk to Gay Sutton about relationships and teamwork in this rapidly developing story.

Lucien Bradet explains how the Canadian Council on Africa is working to change negative perceptions of the continent, support investment into Africa, and ensure that knowledge and skills are transferred with it.

Lean manufacturing is not about adopting Toyota’s tools, or using Japanese terminology, it’s a continuous improvement philosophy that becomes a way of life, says plant manager Billy Taylor.

Goodyear’s Fayetteville plant in North Carolina was struggling to survive in 2010. It was a high cost plant and it wasn’t meeting market demand. The plant was producing 31,200 tires a day, but the market wanted between 36,000 and 38,000. Something had to change.

As the sole producer of rubber in Ghana, Ghana Rubber Estates Limited has been able to lay down the blue print for cash crop farming in the country; however, as managing director Lionel Barre tells Jane McCallion, the company has implemented a policy that prizes partnership with suppliers as much as it does profit.

Famdra may be a small company, but its industrial weighing equipment is setting new standards for accuracy and cost effectiveness, as Gay Sutton discovers.

Against a backdrop of increasing competition from cheap imports and rising transport costs, Astral Foods’ CEO Chris Schutte tells Andrew Pelis how South Africa’s leading integrated poultry producer is going from strength to strength.

The story of Astral Foods’ consistent year-on-year growth traces back to its beginnings in 2001 when conglomerate Tiger Brands decided to unbundle its agricultural arm.

The expression ‘chicken feed’ normally implies something cheap and insignificant, but this is far from the truth when half a million chickens are involved, as Abdul Salam Akate tells Alan Swaby.

The green light has been given for an onshore wind farm in Wales, to be developed by Sweden’s Vattenfall.

The 76-turbine Pen y Cymoedd Wind Energy Project was granted development consent yesterday, by Charles Hendry, energy minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The wind farm is located on publicly-owned land managed by Forestry Commission Wales in the south of the country.

Once operational, it is hoped that Pen y Cymoedd will increase Welsh renewable electricity by 37 per cent.