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US Military Seeks Biodegradable Bullets That Sprout Plants (newatlas.com)
The Department of Defense is looking at ways to clean up the hundreds of thousands of training rounds used by the U.S. army. It is putting out the call for the development of biodegradable ammunition loaded with seeds that sprout plans after being discharged. New Atlas reports: At military facilities across the U.S. and indeed around the world, a huge number of rounds are fired for training purposes, ranging from low-velocity 40 mm grenades, to mortars, to 155 mm artillery rounds. All of these feature components that can take hundreds of years to biodegrade, and falling onto the ground in such great numbers means that finding and cleaning them up is no small task. But left behind, they can corrode and pollute the soil and water supplies. So the Department of Defense has put out a call for proposals through the Small Business Innovation Research agency that solve the problem. The DoD describes the solution as a naturally occurring biodegradable material that can replace those used in current training rounds. It imagines that the biodegradable composites will be capable of holding bioengineered seeds inside (a technology it says has been demonstrated previously), that won't germinate until they have been in the ground for several months. Then plants will sprout from the discharged ammunition that actively remove soil contaminants and consume the other biodegradable components. Also imperative is that animals are able to safely consume the plants.
they FEED people.
Some people in this world really do need shooting though
You are pretty dumb.
There's nothing wrong with cutting costs and reducing pollution. These rounds aren't being made for killing people. You might as well be arguing that they shouldn't train recruits with "fake grenades" at first because fake grenades don't kill anyone.
Unless the plant is native to the area, keep it out. Last thing we need is another kudzu or similar plant spreading like wildfire.
The Army knows from history just how badly the environment can be devastated by combat, or in this case by being used as a training range. Small parts of northern France have been sealed off since the end of WWI as the Zone Rouge both because of the huge quantity of unexploded ordinance and the amount of other toxic materials in the ground, and it may take up to 700 more years before some parts become safe to use. In fact, there are two small pieces of ground where soil samples are up to 17% arsenic, and 99% of all plants that sprout there die. They're trying to find a way to prevent creating more dead zones by using practice ammo that's not made of toxic materials, and I think that's a Good Thing.
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Yep. They do. Their annual ammunition buy is currently about 1.8 billion rounds a year, and essentially all of this gets used in training.
How many rounds do they use in actual combat operations? At the height of the Iraq War the U.S. expended only seventy two million rounds a year in combat. How many were they expending in training each year at that time? 1.1 billion rounds! The rate of training ammunition expenditure has since gone up, and is now 1.8 billion rounds. Before 9/11 the military had a less intense training regimen, they only expended 350 million rounds a year, but that was still five times more than the rate of expenditure in Iraq.
People are always astounded (incredulous, really) to learn that ammunition used in war these days is just round-off error in training ammo purchases.
So, yes, not having to clean up one or two billion casings a year would be a big benefit.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The local skeet range covers a portion its costs with recovered lead. The majority is from range fees and selling targets, but collecting lead is profitable.
Every two or three years (depending on metal prices) they scrape the top six inches of soil off and centrifuge out the metal. Shuts them down for about two weeks. Apparently their is a company that roams around, providing this service.
Rifle ranges aren't that tough to cleanup. Artillery ranges on the other hand, spread the metal further and thinner.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You're shouting common sense into a deep, dark chasm of stupidity. You should know by now that any time a story mentions sustainability, there's going to be dozens of shit-drizzlers who only know that they're supposed to be agin' it.
And every time a story has anything to do with the military, the comment section will be full of anonymous no-dick keyboard kommandos who think playing COD4 and hassling women on Twitter is "fighting the war back home" and thus qualifies them as experts in all things war-fighting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I see a lot of people getting all bent out of shape at the absurdity of the concept of this SBIR topic. I am not a ballistics expert, so I can't comment on that, but please realize that the DoD funds 100s of these grants every year. Most of these, if they are phase I, are very small in scope - $100k - 200k. This is enough to pay a small team working part time to do a feasibility study, create a mock up, or develop a non-working prototype. It's a cheap (for the military) way of bouncing an idea off the wall.
In addition most SBIRs never make it past phase I development. In all likelihood, less will be spent on this program than is spent on a couple of hours of one of the training exercises they are talking about greening up.