Green Bullets

THE DAILY FED

Green Bullets

s America's military prepares to enter the 21st century, soldiers may be casting off one of the oldest and items in their arsenal: bullets made of lead.

For centuries, slugs have been made from lead because it's cheap to mine. But lead pollutes everything it touches, potentially damaging the health of shooters, employees of indoor and outdoor ranges, and neighbors.

Concerned about this-and the growing cost of cleanups-the federal government is determined to start replacing the hundreds of millions of lead-based rounds it shoots every year with non-toxic substitutes. Now Sherri W. Goodman, the Defense Department's undersecretary for environmental security, says the military could be ready to switch to non-toxic ammo by 2000.

The main obstacles are performance and cost. A "green bullet" working group is down to two finalists. One is a metal composite, developed at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that mixes heavy tungsten with lighter metals such as tin, so that bullet densities-and thus ballistic performance-can be controlled. The second is a metal-polymer combination that boasts similar performance properties but may have an edge in price, at least at the outset.

Progress on fabricating a non-lead primer-the part of ammunition that ignites the gunpowder-is moving more slowly. But if Bunting's green-bullet group can pull it off, switching just the military alone could save the environment 1,000 additional tons of lead every year.