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Concrete is most made material and its components come from Earth. It is used on Earth. It is made in such quantities that it is produced locally because it infeasible to transport it long distances. Wood comes from Earth, used on Earth, and makes no sense to manufacture in space.
Chemical industry is another good example, where a lot of the source materials come from Earth (nitrogen, petroleum, gas). All of the processes are designed to work in atmosphere and under gravity. My guess is that nitrogen-based chemicals will be shipped to space for a long time.
Steel is made in huge quantities, with ore trains, ore ships, and giant steel factories. My guess is that even had a free iron asteroid in space, that wouldn't make sense to mine it because getting the results down would be too expensive.
Also, there is a lot of large-scale manufacturing that wouldn't make sense to move because the result is used on Earth. Ship building is a prime example where building anywhere other than next to body of water doesn't make sense. Complex objects also have a lot of parts which means shipping them to space or moving the whole supply chain.
The exception is industry being used for use in space.
On the website, they suggest that these byproducts, i.e. waste, could effectively be dumped into space, where the solar winds would carry it out to the asteroid belt.
I have no expertise to determine if this would ever be viable, but seems like they do at least answer this particular question of yours.
Still, it's a fascinating idea.
Unless you shoot stuff away with railguns, the relevant question might be "at which point are solar winds a bigger factor than drag". I guess it's highly dependent on the exact gas. We lose Helium that way from earth (buoyancy brings it up, where solar winds catch it), so at some height it should work for CO2.
It only really works for gases though, and then only for things that stay reasonably gaseous in orbit (low pressure and large temperature swings). For any solid or liquid you have to worry about it crashing into you on one of the orbits, and at orbital speeds tiny things can impact with a lot of energy.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodyna...
Just to be in the solar wind alone you’d have to be outside the magnetosheath ~60K Km at its closest point, 35K Km is geostationary orbit which costs $10K kg to get to with falcon 9. And now you’d have to send up a whole falcon 9 in order to bring the non byproduct mass back to Earth which would defeat the purpose of venting CO2 to begin with. For those who don’t know it takes roughly the same delta V to bring things back down as it took to send them up.
Though I'm wondering: If manufacturing were done on the moon, would it be safe and feasible to haul some wastes to the lunar equator during the cold of night and let it burn up when daytime temps naturally exceed the boiling point of water from solar power alone?
I assume you mean "on the moon or on earth" since you can't really mine in empty space. The process of either (without air, for a start) would make them so different as to be incomparable.
Mining on the moon would have so many expenses associated, that you could spend the same amount making earth-based processes cleaner. The issue is that it's economical not to do so, so earth processes are dirty by design and due to lack of regulation.
Obviously, the goal is to do the mining in space (moon, asteroids, etc.), and then use those raw materials in space factories.