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Plastic pollution in shooting ranges and warfare areas - an overlooked environmental issue
Summary
Shooting ranges, military training grounds, and conflict zones are largely overlooked as sources of plastic and microplastic pollution, despite decades of spent cartridges, plastic wads, and landmine components breaking down in place. The study reviews how these plastic materials degrade over time into microplastics that contaminate surrounding soil and water, and notes that recreational activities like paintball and airsoft add to the problem. Recognizing these sites as pollution hotspots is important for more complete accounting of where microplastics enter the environment.
Shooting ranges and military training fields, including warfare-impacted areas, have been widely recognized as environmentally impacted zones by inorganic and organic contamination, such as heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or explosive-related compounds. However, the possible contamination by plastics and microplastics in soil has been widely overlooked despite potential plastic sources, such as shotgun cartridges, plastic wads or landmines. Due to how these activities occur, plastics have remained in the field for decades or centuries, favoring their conversion from macro to microplastics, polluting the soil and water resources. Moreover, shooting and recreational activities such as airsoft or paintball practices could also be a substantial source of plastics to ecosystems; once shot, pellets can have conventional or biodegradable plastics in their composition, and there left in the environment, favouring impacts on soil properties. Although some initiatives have emerged to avoid the use of single-use plastics in shotgun ammunition, alternative materials (biodegradable plastics) can also be a potential risk, favouring the heavy metal bioavailability of shot pellets. These emerging pollutants should also be considered in these areas to understand if they could be a potential source of micro- and nanoplastics to the environment and, therefore, an environmental concern that requires changes at industrial and regulatory levels.