Green bullets are not safe for the environment.

li nk

BOURNE, Mass. - Army officials at Camp Edwards believed they were being eco-friendly when they started using a "green bullet" that contains no lead — a move meant to prevent polluting an aquifer beneath the base.

But six years later, after a million rounds have been fired at the base's shooting ranges, new information suggests the green bullets may not be much better for the environment than the lead ones.

"It's frustrating," Col. William FitzPatrick of the National Guard's Environmental Readiness Center said Thursday. "You're doing what you think are the right things. As science evolves, you wonder, 'Am I in front of the curve, or behind?'"

The green bullets are made of nylon and tungsten, a metal that supposedly does not seep into ground as quickly as lead. That's important because the aquifer below the base supplies upper Cape Cod with drinking water.

But conventional wisdom about tungsten has been challenged by tests done in recent years at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

Lab tests there found in 2002 that tungsten was not insoluble and that it could travel through soil under certain conditions. It also found that tungsten enables lead to move through the soil more quickly.

In 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered target practice halted at the camp and ordered a clean-up of lead buried in and around the berms at the base shooting ranges.

Lead was later found 19 feet underground and moving toward the aquifer — though it never reached the water.

so much for the time, taxpayers money and we still dont have an environmental friendly bullets. i really hate this stuff, i expect the military to be spending on better bullets than about how environmentally friendly leftover bullets are to an already destroyed or scarred battlefield. i expect the military to be spending on R & D to improve the bullet performances to help save a soldier's life wen taking down an enemy, than to be concern about the environment.

True. War is bad for the environment no matter who is fighting and what technology is used. The best military environmental practice is to be so powerful and effective that any potential adversary is afraid to start a war -- thus reducing environmental impacts overall.

The primary function of the military is not to wage war -- it is to keep the peace and our country safe. Being strong does exactly that. Compromising the effectiveness of our military is the surest way to war and having all of war's environmental impacts.

Delta
You wouldn't feel that way if you had to drink contaminated water.

There's no reason to destroy the local environment to ensure readiness. It would be far better to line the ground with many layers of plastic or ceramic or whatever, below soil level, and then just use whatever bullets are cheapest for target practice.

The environment is incredibly important. It shouldn't just be tree-huggers concerned about it, we all need to do our part, because we all need to live here yaknow.

Even animals know not to # where they eat/drink.

I dont see why they can't simply improve the range so that spent lead can be retrieved and processed into something useful rather than just leaving it around to infiltrate the water supply? With such a system in place normal lead based bullets could be used without fear of messing up the water system? Sure it might not help areas of combat where rounds can't exactly be collected, but it would surely help out military bases.

Thats a tough one really......the cost of trying to collect spent bullets would probably be stupendously expensive and nigh on impossible...(unless they limit the firing area to a managable size?) ....what about using bio-degradble plastic?......or am i way off?