Pink slip leads to green-collar job

After getting pink-slipped a second time by an auto supplier thanks to the woeful economy, David Shaw shifted gears.

"I'd had it with auto manufacturing," said Shaw, 48, a married father of two young children who lives in Harrison Township. "I wasn't sure what I would do next but knew I wanted to be in control of my own destiny for a change."

Shaw spent months weighing options and kept coming back to one thing: alternative energy. With oil prices marching higher and society focused on being green, he figured that would be more recession-proof.

He joined Clean Emission Fluids as its chief operating officer a year ago and helped create an innovative dispensing station for biofuel and diesel exhaust fluids.

The Grosse Pointe-based firm has a dispensing station in the shadows of the former General Motors headquarters in Detroit, where vehicles used by Art Van Furniture and others are filling up.

Shaw is hardly alone in seeing alternative energy as a way to help recharge the state's economic prospects.

Numerous leaders of businesses, politics and education are looking at alternative energy and jobs associated with things like building windmills, solar panels and creating renewable energy as ways to help replenish some of the many thousands of auto manufacturing jobs lost in southeast Michigan.