Modern industrial uses are a lot less noxious than they used to be, even though most people don't realize that.
For example, the U.S. Mint in Denver is actually a pretty hard core industrial use that turns raw metal into coins through an industrial process. But, from the sidewalk right next to it, in the middle of downtown, you wouldn't be able to guess that it wasn't an office building.
Detroit has one of the nation's largest salt mines, tucked away with an entrance in an innocuous low rise building that you'd never notice was anything other than a storage facility with a decent sized parking lot. It's less of a disturbance to the neighborhood than a rowdy dive bar.
A large scale brewery capable of providing beer for several million people is similarly surprisingly quiet (almost all a series of connected pipes), employed about twenty people, and is mostly notable for trucks dropping off raw materials and taking away finished products. Small scale distilleries and milk processing plants (I have both in my urban residential neighborhood) are similarly barely more notable than a self-storage place.
I've been to the factory that makes all of the world's Celestial Seasonings Tea, and you can't hear anything notable on the outside, although it does have some strong smells on the inside. Ditto for several other factories around town.
The factory in Colorado that makes the giant windmill blades for industrial sized electricity generation from wind creates less disturbance in the neighborhood than a high school or a pro-baseball field.
Also, most modern factories run on electricity and natural gas, rather than coal and oil, like they did in the industrial era.
Pretty much the only really noxious modern industrial facilities are oil refineries, coal fired power plants (a rapidly declining share of the total power grid), steel plants that use coke (the coal product, not the soft drink), slaughter houses, and dog food factories (one in Commerce City, Colorado stinks up the entire city when the Chinook winds blow in from the north).
The other really noxious modern land uses are landfills (although less so now that people figured out that collecting methane emissions and recycling compost creates another revenue stream), and feed lots (thousands of cows crammed densely into cattle factories) which smell intensely like cow poop for miles.
A modern feed lot
Factories do like to be near rivers or rail lines, however, so goods can get to and from their destinations.
Bottom Line
Almost all of the intra-urban geography of the vast majority of industrial uses are anachronistic residues of how bad industrial uses were for neighborhoods a century ago.
And, to a great extent that goes for what goes on inside factories too. The number of people killed or seriously injured in factories is now barely more than the number killed or injured working in offices or malls or convenience stores.
This is also true of other historical NIMBY uses that still have that connotation like secure prisons and jails which have virtually zero escapes and really don't have to be a bother. From the outside, it is almost impossible to distinguish a modern jail from a modern courthouse, if designed appropriately.
The vast majority of dangerous jobs these days involve working in uncontrolled surroundings like an outdoor construction site, a farm, logging, commercial fishing, or working on repairing roads and bridges.
The only uses that really should be kept at a distance need a range of perhaps five or ten miles from residential areas if they smell really bad, and otherwise can be integrated very closely with any commercial or residential district if they aren't burdened with the historical legacy of land use decisions made based upon earlier inferior coal/steam age technologies.
