Made In The USA: Elite Outfitting Solutions

We have a new feature here at Riverside Green: Made In The USA. This feature will serve to spotlight items that are manufactured in the United States, so you can toss some of your valuable business towards the companies that still believe in American manufacturing.

Of course, that's a tricky concept: manufactured in the United States.

New Balance offers "Made In The USA" and "Assembled In The USA" sneakers. The difference is in the percentage of materials sourced from the United States. Virtually nothing more complicated than an acoustic guitar is entirely made in the United States, you know. Then you have the issue of sourcing: Is a Paul Reed Smith guitar where every single molecule of the wood used in its construction is sourced outside the country "Made In USA"? What about Chinese guitars that are made from American-sourced wood?

It's a thorny issue so I'm going to use the Potter Stewart method: I know American-made stuff when I see it. More or less.

Case in point. I contacted Elite Outfitting Solutions (https://www.eoscases.com/) to find out about their sourcing. They responded as follows:

All materials and machining done in U.S. Of A!

So I ordered a few things from them. But I was curious about their claim that the material itself is from the United States. I always thought that there was no way to get titanium from an American supplier. Turns out that I wasn't entirely correct:

Titanium is found in many minerals. Ilmenite (FeTiO3) and rutile (TiO2) are the most important sources of titanium. Ilmenite provides about 90% of the titanium used every year. It is estimated that the resources of ilmenite in the world contain 1 billion tons of titanium dioxide. The estimated resources of rutile in the world contain about 230 million tons of titanium dioxide. Rutile and ilmenite are extracted from sands that may contain only a few percent by weight of these minerals. After the valuable minerals are separated, the remaining sands are returned to the deposit and the land recultivated. In the United States, titanium-rich sands are mined in Florida and Virginia. Even though the United States mines and processes titanium and titanium dioxide, it still imports significant amounts of both. Metallic titanium is imported from Russia (36%), Japan (36%), Kazakhstan (25%), and other nations (3%). TiO2 pigment for paint is imported from Canada (33%), Germany (12%), France (8%), Spain (6%), and other nations (36%).

Interestingly enough, titanium is very easy to find on the moon. So when humanity eventually colonizes the Moon...

...brief pause for laughter at the idea that Tumblr Nation could ever bother to colonize anything, or even study anything besides its own navel...

...the structures might be made entirely of titanium.

The Moon is a harsh mistress, you know. Oh, the hell with it. This is my blog, and if I want to use that as a segue, I can do it. Here's some American-made music, Oklahoma's Jimmy Webb via Missouri boy Pat Metheny and Iowan Charlie Haden:

If you don't know the lyrics, here are some of them:

I fell out of her eyes. I fell out of her heart. I fell down on my face. I tripped and missed my start. God, I fell and fell alone. The moon's a harsh mistress. She's hard to call your own. The moon's a harsh mistress. The sky is made of stone.

And from the Kansas-born Karrin Allyson:

The sky is made of stone.