Every kind of manufacturing produces some waste or damage. Synthetic kits have their own environmental costs, such as toxic waste.
www.terrasonus.com
Q. How environmentally friendly is the manufacturing process for Tempus shells?
A. While it's true that what I do is no threat to the world's forests, this is still industry and, as such, it still consumes raw materials and produces waste to some degree. The Composites Fabricators Association maintains quite an excellent web site (
www.cfa-hq.org/) wherein, if you peruse the Technical Resources section, you can read up on what's allowable in terms of emissions, workplace conditions, safety issues and the like.
Certainly my factory is well within acceptable parameters but, even so, I work in a full-body Tyvek moon suit sporting complete airport runway quality hearing protection and a chemically rated filter mask... not a particularly endearing sight to anyone who visits the facility but, then again, I don't generally invite company round to begin with...
Basically, in building my shells I use resins and gels which emit styrene particles in infinitesimal quantities ( a few parts per billion ); these can, at best, give you a bit of a headache if you breathe in the fumes for long enough. The booth I do most of the work in is exhaust filtered, which catches any particles which don't fall to the floor on their own. I also create dust which rapidly settles to the ground and is subsequently swept up and ends up in, unfortunately, a local landfill site. Leftover shell cuttings are usually mailed out as colour samples to interested parties who then, one naturally assumes, keep them for life as treasured memorabilia to be handed down to their heirs.
My resins and gels are derived from oil; thus, not really an imminently exhaustible resource and, if the truth be told, much, much older than your basic Timeless Timber... And Fibreglass is derived from sand, again something we're not short of.
And, truthfully, there's only ever been one fatality at my factory, that being a squirrel which somehow managed to drink half a quart of acetone. Since my mental facilities are easily twice that of the average small furry rodent, I figure I'll be OK... So, all in all, not a bad situation
vis a vis my contributions to environmental health and well-being.