I understand where you’re coming from. Where I’m coming from is that committees like laser and machine shop have had rules in place about prohibited materials in place for quite some time. Why the kickback in the woodshop? (Pun intended) Our prohibited materials list is much shorter, and is in place to protect peoples lungs and/or prevent damaging the machines, just like the other committees.
The reasoning is simple. Pitch, sap or pine tar, or whatever you want to call it gums up cutter heads and blades and makes them act dull. I teach in my woodshop basics class never to use a dull tool. Cleaning up pine pitch takes several hours per machine, at which time the machine is unavailable to the rest of the Makerspace. Not to mention we don’t know how bad the buildup is until it starts messing up other peoples work. At that point, we can usually save the machine, but can do nothing to restore peoples hard work.
Here are a few links that talk about this issue.
Pitch_BuildUp_When_Planing_AirDried_Pine.html
http://www.woodweb.com/knowledge_base/Cleaning_Pitch_off_Cutterheads.html
These articles discuss the extra steps and sometimes caustic or dangerous chemicals that we have to use to clean the buildup from the machines.
One maintenance day per month is not enough to keep up with the amount of framing lumber that would come thru the shop. We tried to provide an alternative for people who still wanted to work with pine or pressure treated at the space by buying a brand new tablesaw to be used exclusively for that purpose. Also, all of the hand held power tools and non-powered hand tools are still available for use. Another alternative is to restrict makers to only using kiln dried pine on the milling machines (as is recommended on at least one of the websites I listed). Unfortunately, once it gets past the milling steps we have no way of knowing where it came from.
One more link on pine furniture construction: