Gordan,
There is a thermoplastic, which has been developed, to replace leaded bullets. For more info
see this web site: www.texasresearchintl.com - then click on Ecomass.
D. A. Douthit
"Davy, Gordon" wrote:
> Today's Fox News article on the Army switch away from lead in ammunition,
> brought to the attention of this forum by Doug Romm, contained this nugget:
>
> In 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Army's
> Massachusetts Military Reservation to stop all live-fire training after a
> study showed lead and other toxins seeping into Cape Cod's underground water
> supply.
> The assertion that lead from bullets is the cause of elevated lead in Cape
> Cod water, should it be true, offers all kinds of interesting possibilities
> for a follow-up story. I haven't checked out the source of the claim, but
> based on previous investigation I did looking for such instances, I'm
> skeptical. Long-time forum participants may recall the abandoned lead mine
> that is now being used to train scuba divers. The lead content in this water
> is quite low. Also, municipal water suppliers measure lead in the water at
> the customer's faucet and adjust the pH to control it. They do not seem very
> concerned about the levels of lead they see in the water that they start
> with.
>
> Why would the lead in water be high just in Cape Cod? As the article points
> out, there are lots of places where lead bullets have been used for
> training. If the claim is true, then the Army ought to be performing a
> comprehensive review of lead in water at all of those places, too. Maybe
> some environmental group would like to take this on as a project. I just
> hope that if such a review is performed, the results, positive or negative,
> are publicized.
>
> Everyone favors being good stewards of the environment. The question that
> needs to be addressed is, are we going to make our decisions based on public
> sentiment, intuition, and urban legends, or are we going to use data? Apart
> from the claim about Cape Cod's water supply, I didn't see any other
> reference to how the spent bullets in the ground are causing a problem for
> anyone. (I know about lead shotgun pellets affecting waterfowl, but if
> that's relevant to this situation it wasn't mentioned.) It's worth
> remembering that the ground there, as everywhere else, contains lead left
> over from the decades during which tetraethyl lead was added to gasoline. If
> lead in the surface layers of the earth were an environmental hazard, we
> could regard the entire earth as one vast Superfund site. (Bruce Euzent's
> comments about wheel-balancing weights contaminating San Francisco Bay fits
> in here, too. Where are the data showing that these wheel weights cause an
> elevated lead level in bay water?)
>
> Stopping the use of lead bullets cannot possibly have a measurable effect on
> the amount of lead in Cape Cod's water. Everyone knows how it is still
> common to find bullets left over from the Civil War. They are still there
> after 135 years or more because they don't dissolve (or dissolve very, very
> slowly, and precipitate as lead carbonate or lead sulfate very close by).
> I'm sure that buried bullets from the Revolutionary War still exist
> undissolved, too. Does the Army intend to remove all the bullets in the
> ground at the Massachusetts Military Reservation? If not, how can the EPA
> think that they have accomplished their objective? What will they do when
> they discover that the lead levels in Cape Cod water are not dropping as a
> result of their order? How many cases of elevated blood lead levels are
> being found in Cape Cod compared to other places around the country? The
> data that I've seen all indicate a drastic reduction in blood lead levels in
> the US since the cessation of use of lead-based paint and lead in gasoline.
>
> How many lives does the Army or the EPA think that they can save by taking
> such measures? No one ever says. It's just "good environmental stewardship",
> with no cost-benefit analysis. The real basis for deciding to make the
> switch from lead to tungsten composite should be a simple cost trade-off
> between the extra cost per bullet and the money saved from reduced barrel
> erosion, plus the benefit of improved target accuracy. The rest is just
> political correctness. Irrational, but it makes some people feel good.
>
> Gordon Davy
>
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