"Green" ammunition
Americans will make shells biodegradable
Vasily Sychev, N+1
The US Department of Defense has announced a tender for the development of new biodegradable training ammunition. We are talking about 40-millimeter grenades, 60-, 81- and 120-millimeter mortar mines, as well as 120- and 155-millimeter artillery shells. The new ammunition will have to replace the traditional ones and will be used at all American military training grounds without exception.
For the past six years, the Pentagon has considered climate change caused by human activity to be a threat to national security. The military believes that climate change will lead to an increase in the number of poor and food shortages and, as a result, to an increase in social tension, which means even greater destabilization of countries with already unstable political regimes.
The Pentagon believes that the US armed forces, as the largest consumers of fuel and ammunition, cause significant damage to the environment. To minimize it, the military began to implement a number of environmental programs, including the conversion of aircraft and ships to biofuels, the active use of solar energy and the processing of household waste into fuel.
The new tender for the development of biodegradable ammunition is one of the Pentagon's steps to reduce the military's influence on the climate. During the exercises, the military spends a large amount of training ammunition, from which cartridges, driving devices, pallets, and in some cases lead cores remain at the landfills. These elements can poison the soil and animals.
According to the requirement of the military, new ammunition must be made of materials that decompose quickly in nature and do not harm the environment. One of the materials from which new training ammunition can be made, the military called bamboo fiber.
New training ammunition must also contain seeds of genetically modified plants. Such plants, according to the requirements of the military, should clean the soil from contamination and accelerate the decomposition of ammunition residues. In addition, genetically modified plants should not harm animals if they eat them.
The development of new ammunition within the framework of the tender will be carried out in three stages. At the first stage, participating companies will have to submit ammunition prototypes for testing. At the second stage, the participants will have to prepare mass production of shells, grenades and mines, and at the third stage – to develop a plan for the gradual transfer of landfills to the use of new biodegradable ammunition.
Since 2010, the US Army and Marine Corps have been gradually switching to the use of "green" 5.56 mm caliber M855A1 cartridges for M4 and M16 submachine guns and rifles. The bullets in these cartridges have a copper core and a steel tip, instead of the traditional lead core.
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11.01.2017