They should be able to provide the information or at least put you in contact with their supplier. When i order the material mine comes from Moduslink in Tennessee.
You should be able to push back on that. If not the finished wood but the parts that make them.
Plywoods are processed and there will be MSDS for the glue etc and the MSDS for the masking has to exist
No idea what lab or what the overall policies are, but if a material is non-hazardous, OSHA doesn’t mandate maintaining MSDS/SDS under the Hazard Communication Standard.
Yes in order to prove the material is laser safe and Proofgrade is guaranteed to be safe it needs to be backed up. MSDS would show that
That way if the proofgrade manufacturer switched glue suppliers and used a toxic glue in the plywood Glowforge would go after the supplier if one of us is harmed.
So, catch-22? An MSDS purpose isnt to prove that something isn’t hazardous (though it’s used that way by most of us). And an MSDS doesn’t have to be created for non-hazardous materials.
I don’t care to chase the rabbit down the hole, but there are a few applicable areas as far as wood that could apply.
29 CFR 1910.1200(b)(6)(iv) could apply
It could also fall under the Consumer Product Safety Act requirements rather than HCS, I believe.
One of the things that may make a difference here is that Glowforge does not have or offer commercial accounts, which can change requirements.
(Thanks everyone for jumping on this thread. Really appreciate the thoughts here.)
But when you burn these materials they produce noxious fumes. That’s part of the reason there’s an air filter or fan that exhausts them.
For example, I have other MSDS for different kinds of acrylic; however, glowforge won’t provide me one for theirs. In fact, you can find an MSDS for other brands of probably all these materials.
My understanding is that the benefit of the proofgrade materials is that they’re tested with the machine for cut quality and guaranteed not to have substances that are damaging to the machine. That doesn’t mean they aren’t hazardous to humans.
OSHA requires MSDS for consumer goods when someone can be exposed to them over longer periods of time in a production like environment. Glowforge is selling this machine to home users, in part, to jump start their own businesses. So, I would think that qualifies even at home with limited production runs.
The challenge is non hazardous things produce toxic smoke when lasered even if it’s just smoke. I mean wood smoke is toxic. Taking a potato and lasering it also produces probable toxins, but good luck getting a msds for your potato.
