Ok, exactly how does one make a "Green" stompbox anyhow? Especially since the entire thing is made of (or with) some type of petroleum product. Well, we tried making a Fuzz unit out of hemp and bamboo, but it wasn't very durable, smelled bad after a while, and getting it past airport security dope-sniffing-dogs proved difficult. ~Ahem~ Kidding aside, we've tried to figure out a way to reduce our Carbon Footprint as much as possible with Farndurk products.
Bad ol' puddy tat!
In our quest, the battery was the first place we went. Non-rechargeable batteries are one of the biggest energy wasting devices that civilization uses. Think about it .... it takes a certain amount of energy to charge a stompbox battery up to 9 volts, but it's only used down to about 6 volts, then thrown away (creating more hazardous waste in the process). 66% of the energy used to charge the battery was thrown out. Only 1/3rd of it's "total charge" was used and then the corpse was turned into Hazardous Material. Look at it from our end ... if most stompboxes use (let's say) 3 batteries per year, and Farndurk sells (let's say) 200 stompboxes per year, that generates over 600 dead batteries in one year. In 10 years (2 thousand pedals) Farndurk would be responsible for generating 6 THOUSAND dead batteries per year. Like we need more of this kind of wasteful thinking (not!). So it's little things like these that Farndurk is doing to keep even the lowly stompbox as Eco-Responsible as possible.
The Enclosure.
Another big part of what we do is the fact that the only part of our pedals that is difficult to recycle is the coverplate. Other pedal builders paint or powdercoat the ~box~ portion of the enclosure. This makes them non-recycleable. We apply finishes only on the cover plate itself so if any part of the enclosure is deemed non-recycleable it will be only the cover and not the entire box section.
That engineering also lends to being more green simply because much less petroleum based material is used to apply finishes to our designs. Since we only powdercoat the coverplate we're using far less of the powdered platic ... which is what powdercoating is ... just finely powdered plastic that is literally melted on to the surface by using an oven at around 375f to 400f degrees for roughly 45 minutes or so. So we use less plastic (powder) which is a petroleum product to begin with, and less natural gas or electricity is used to bake the powder on because we use much less powder in the first place.
Aluma finish ... our ultimate green finish:
If you elect to go with our Aluma finish then the greenage jumps up even higher. Aluma uses only a very small amount of epoxy resin to backfill the handstamped lettering. No ~baking~ in ovens, no petroleum based powders used. Just finely ground-flat and polished aluminum .. all done 100% by hand (no sanders or polishers or buffing machines used at all .. no chemicals are used to obtain our Aluma finish either other than the epoxy backfill for the lettering. Nothing more than a lot of hard manual labor with the proper touch). Even the lettering is all done 100% powered by humans.
The only ~power tools~ used to make a Farndurk pedal in Aluma finish is a drill press for the holes and a soldering pen.